Software Development Engineer, Data Center Builder Tools

About the Role

The Data Center Builder Tools team is looking for an innovative, self-directed Software Development Engineer to build the next generation of real-time middleware and runtime software that powers industrial control systems across AWS Data Centers worldwide. Contribute to Amazon's vision of developing the safest, most secure, reliable, and efficient data centers on Earth.

As a Software Development Engineer II (SDE II) on this team, you will design and build the software that sits between industrial hardware and the cloud — a unified, real-time data plane that lets control applications, device drivers, and cloud services exchange data reliably on industrial computing hardware. This is deep systems work: you will shape the runtime, the communication layer, and the protocol integrations that everything else in the platform is built on.

What You'll Do

• Design and build real-time middleware and runtime components — the data-exchange layer, type system, and communication patterns (publish/subscribe and request/reply) that connect distributed control applications across languages and hardware.
• Integrate with industrial automation platforms and hardware protocols (e.g. IEC 61131-3, EtherCAT, PROFINET, Modbus, OPC-UA, IO-Link) and the device drivers that bridge them onto the platform.
• Build the bridge to the cloud — reliable metric publication, command handling, and telemetry from the edge into AWS, with the right delivery guarantees for each data class.
• Work at the boundary of distributed and real-time systems, where correctness means both the right result and the right timing — bounded latency, predictable behavior, and graceful degradation when connectivity is lost.
• Partner with a cross-functional team of hardware engineers, controls engineers, data center operations, and security specialists to take features from design through to hardware validation.

Who You Are

If you're excited by low-level systems, real-time data movement, and connecting physical equipment to the cloud at scale, this is the role for you.

Key Responsibilities

• Architecting and implementing runtime and real-time middleware — high-performance, low-latency components that run both on embedded/edge controllers and in the cloud, with a focus on determinism, reliability, and resource efficiency on constrained hardware.
• Building industrial protocol and hardware integrations — extending the platform with new device drivers and protocol support and solving the hard problems of cross-language, cross-platform data exchange (type systems, serialization, memory layout, and schema/versioning).
• Owning the edge-to-cloud communication path — designing how telemetry, metrics, and commands flow between devices and AWS services with appropriate quality-of-service, backpressure, and store-and-forward behavior.
• Engineering for real-time correctness — reasoning about latency budgets, throughput, and failure modes in a distributed system where the software is adjacent to physical control loops.
• Raising the engineering bar — driving strong testing (unit, integration, and on-hardware validation), performance benchmarking, code review, and operational excellence for the components you own.
• Collaborating across disciplines—working with hardware, controls, security, and operations partners to turn ambiguous requirements into robust, shippable software.
• Mentoring and contributing to technical direction — guiding more junior engineers and helping shape the roadmap for the runtime and middleware layer.