Amazon Leo is our low Earth orbit satellite broadband network. Its mission is to deliver fast, reliable internet to customers and communities around the world, and we've designed the system with the capacity, flexibility, and performance to serve a wide range of customers, from individual households to schools, hospitals, businesses, government agencies, and other organizations operating in locations without reliable connectivity.
We are seeking a Senior Software Development Engineer (SDE III) to join our team building intelligent data platforms and AI agentic solutions for Amazon Leo's Optical Inter-Satellite Link (OISL) systems — spanning both ground production and on-orbit infrastructure. You will lead the design, development, and deployment of large-scale data pipelines and AI-driven automation that operate at satellite-network scale — processing telemetry, manufacturing data, operational events, and network data to enable proactive decision-making across the Leo ecosystem.
Security is not a separate workstream here — it's foundational to everything we build. You will approach every design decision, architecture choice, and data flow with a security-first mindset, ensuring that the systems we deliver are secure by design rather than secured as an afterthought. You will own the technical vision and architecture for critical systems, influence team strategy, mentor engineers, and drive cross-functional collaboration across networking, operations, and data science teams. You will be expected to operate with significant autonomy, make sound technical trade-offs, and deliver high-quality, production-ready solutions in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment.
Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.
Key job responsibilities
- Architecture & Technical Leadership: Define the architecture for scalable data engineering platforms and AI agentic pipelines that process ground production data, satellite telemetry, network events, and on-orbit operational data at scale — with security built into every layer from the ground up
- AI Agentic Solutions: Design, build, and deploy LLM-powered autonomous agent systems (multi-agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, tool-use frameworks) for intelligent automation — including investigation, triage, and remediation workflows
- Data Engineering: Build and optimize large-scale data pipelines (batch and streaming) using technologies such as Apache Flink, Spark, Kafka, and AWS-native services (Kinesis, Glue, S3, Redshift, OpenSearch)
- Security-First Design: Champion a security-first engineering culture — embed threat modeling, least-privilege access, encryption in transit/at rest, secure coding practices, and defense-in-depth principles into system design from day one
- Cross-Team Influence: Partner with Networking, Operations, and Data Science teams to identify opportunities for AI-driven automation and drive adoption of intelligent tooling
- Mentorship: Mentor junior engineers, raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design reviews, and development of best practices
- Operational Excellence: Own the end-to-end lifecycle of services including monitoring, alarming, on-call support, and continuous improvement
Basic Qualifications
- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field
- 3+ years of experience with data engineering (ETL/ELT pipelines, data warehousing, streaming architectures)
- Strong proficiency in at least one systems language (Java, Python, Go, Rust, or C++)
- Experience with AWS services (EC2, S3, Lambda, Step Functions, Kinesis, DynamoDB, or equivalent)
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code (CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform)
- Demonstrated security-first mindset: experience applying threat modeling, secure design patterns, and defense-in-depth to production systems
Preferred Qualifications
- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related field
- Experience building LLM-based agentic systems (autonomous agents, multi-agent frameworks, tool-use patterns, RAG)
- Experience with ML/AI pipeline orchestration (SageMaker, Bedrock, or similar platforms)
- Experience with streaming data technologies (Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, Kinesis Data Analytics)
- Experience with graph databases or knowledge graphs
- Track record of technical leadership: writing design documents, leading architecture reviews, defining team technical roadmaps
- Familiarity with satellite/telecommunications systems or IoT-scale data processing
- Experience with security practices such as zero-trust architectures, identity & access management, encryption frameworks, or compliance automation
- Active security clearance or ability to obtain one
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, WA, Redmond - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually