Principal Engineer, Amazon Software Builder Experience (ASBX)

About the role

As a Principal Engineer in Amazon Software Builder Experience (ASBX), you will be one of the most senior technical leaders in the organization, setting technical direction for platforms and services that thousands of Amazon builders depend on. You will tackle ambiguous, large-scale problems that span multiple teams and systems, and translate them into clear, durable technical strategies.

Principal Engineers at Amazon are hands-on technologists and force multipliers. You will combine deep technical expertise with broad influence — writing and reviewing designs, raising the engineering bar, mentoring senior engineers, and partnering with engineering leaders to make the right long-term architectural and investment decisions. Your work will directly shape developer experience, software quality, delivery velocity, and operational safety at Amazon scale.

Key job responsibilities

- Set and drive technical strategy for complex, high-impact platforms and services used broadly across Amazon's engineering community.

- Decompose ambiguous, large-scale problems into simple, scalable, and maintainable solutions, and define multi-year technical roadmaps.

- Lead the design and architecture of distributed systems that operate reliably at massive scale.

- Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, code reviews, operational excellence practices, and mentorship of senior and principal-track engineers.

- Partner with engineering, product, and science leaders to align technical direction with organizational goals and customer needs.

- Identify and prioritize the highest-leverage opportunities to improve how Amazon builders develop, build, test, deploy, and operate software — including opportunities created by Generative AI and agentic development.

- Influence engineering standards and best practices across team and organizational boundaries.

- Balance long-term transformation with incremental, measurable delivery of value.

A day in the life

You spend your time where the hardest technical problems are. You dive deep into architecture, write and critique design documents, and get close to the technology to understand root causes. You are frustrated by inefficiencies that make building software unnecessarily difficult, and you channel that into durable solutions. You move fluidly between hands-on technical work and high-leverage influence — unblocking teams, aligning stakeholders, and mentoring the next generation of technical leaders. You think in terms of systems and in terms of the builder's experience, and you consistently simplify complexity rather than add to it.

About the team

Amazon Software Builder Experience (ASBX) is the AWS organization dedicated to improving the experience of software builders across Amazon. ASBX owns the foundational platforms, tools, and services that Amazon's engineering community uses to design, build, test, deploy, and operate software — at a scale measured in millions of operations every day.