System Development Manager, AWS Resilience, AWS Incident Response, AWS Incident Response

ID: 5711

Type: Full-time

Category: Others

Company Name: Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc.

Location: USA, WA, Seattle - Seattle - United States

Salary: 166,300.00 - 225,000.00 USD annually

Job Description

AWS Incident Response (AIR) keeps AWS working for millions of customers. When major incidents hit, AIR leads the response coordinating resolvers across AWS and driving mitigation. We move fast, but not carelessly - obsessing over observability of the cloud and perpetually improving our detection and response speed and accuracy. We ensure each incident drives improvements that strengthen AWS. It's a high-visibility, high-impact role with a global view of AWS health that few teams get to see.

The Role

As the Systems Development Manager for AIR's Seattle team, you'll lead engineers through both operational excellence and tooling delivery. You'll be on the calls - leading incident response, driving clear communication under pressure, ensuring your team grows sharper, and helping raise the resiliency of AWS for all customers. You'll own career development for your engineers, coordinate with peer managers in Sydney and Dublin, partner with alarming and detection teams, and represent AIR to senior leadership. This role is for someone energized by operational leadership who understands systems engineering deeply enough to guide and grow the people doing it.

Key job responsibilities
Incident Response Leadership

Own the operational readiness of your team for high-severity incident response. Ensure your engineers can lead calls effectively - triaging, coordinating resolvers, communicating clearly under pressure, and driving incidents to mitigation. Drive improvements in the tooling and automation that supports incident response.

Detection & Observability Improvement

Drive improvements in how AIR detects and responds to AWS health events. Use data and learnings from real incidents to improve detection speed, accuracy, and coverage. Explore new approaches, including generative AI, to find leaps in detection and response capabilities. Make the important obvious and automate the routine.

Cross-Site, Cross-Team Coordination

Coordinate with peer managers in Sydney and Dublin and partner with alarming, detection, and incident tooling teams. Establish clear communication channels and feedback loops across the incident management ecosystem.

Post-Incident Analysis

Lead root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews. Ensure learnings drive corrective actions and that service teams follow through, closing the loop so each incident makes AWS stronger.

Performance Management & Team Development

Own all facets of performance and career management for your team. Grow engineers at all levels, manage operational load, and maintain a high bar for hiring.

About the team
AWS Incident Response (AIR) leads the response when major incidents hit AWS, coordinating resolvers across services and driving mitigation for complex, multi-service failures that affect millions of customers. The team operates globally across Seattle, Sydney, and Dublin, providing 24/7 coverage. Beyond real-time incident leadership, AIR drives improvements in detection, observability, and response tooling,
ensuring each incident makes AWS stronger. It's a high-visibility team with a rare, cross-cutting view of AWS health, focused on making the important obvious and automating the routine.

Basic Qualifications

- 1+ years of engineering team management experience
- 5+ years of experience in systems engineering, systems development, or infrastructure operations
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking fundamentals, and infrastructure failure modes
- Excellent communication skills, particularly the ability to convey technical complexity clearly and quickly under pressure

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience hiring, developing and promoting engineering talent
- Experience using data to drive root cause elimination and process improvement
- Experience managing communication with geographically distributed teams
- Experience with operational best practices: monitoring, alerting, and post-incident analysis

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, Seattle - 166,300.00 - 225,000.00 USD annually

Company Information

Company Name: Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc.

Company Website: https://www.amazon.com

Company Address: 410 Terry Avenue North, Seattle, WA 98109, USA

Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc. is a United States-based legal entity and operating subsidiary affiliated with Amazon.com, Inc., established to support the parent company’s software development, engineering, research and product delivery activities within the United States. As an operating arm within the broader Amazon corporate structure, this entity functions primarily as a development center that consolidates engineering, product management, research and related professional services for Amazon’s array of consumer, retail, cloud and device products. The subsidiary serves as an organizational vehicle for recruiting and employing technical and non-technical staff, conducting product and systems development work, and coordinating cross-functional programs that feed into Amazon’s global platforms and services. At a high level, the core activities of Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc. include software engineering and application development; systems design and infrastructure engineering; data science and machine learning research; product and program management; testing and quality assurance; and operational support for services deployed across Amazon’s businesses. The work performed by teams associated with this development center contributes to the design, build, deployment and maintenance of scalable back-end services, consumer-facing features and enterprise tools. These activities typically span areas such as e-commerce retail systems, inventory and fulfillment technology, payments and checkout systems, recommendation and personalization engines, search and catalog services, advertising technology, cloud infrastructure services, developer tools, voice and device platforms (including Alexa and related embedded software), and mobile and web application front ends. The main products and services supported through the development center are those that reflect Amazon’s primary business lines. This includes contributions to Amazon.com’s retail and marketplace platform (catalog management, customer experience features, seller systems and order processing), Amazon Web Services (cloud compute, storage, data services and developer tooling), Alexa and devices (voice assistant features, device firmware, and cloud-based voice services), Kindle and digital content services (content distribution and reading applications), Prime membership features (media delivery, recommendations, and benefits management), and advertising technology (ad serving, targeting and measurement solutions). In each area, the development center’s personnel typically work on software components, APIs, distributed systems, automation, security, reliability engineering and performance optimization to enable scalable, resilient services used by millions of customers worldwide. Beyond product development, the development center supports organizational activities such as engineering hiring and on-boarding, developer training programs, localized research initiatives, collaboration with academic partners, and participation in global product planning and feature roll-outs. Teams at the center often collaborate with other Amazon business units and international development centers to integrate new features into global releases, implement region-specific regulatory or compliance requirements, and adapt large-scale services to meet diverse customer and market needs. Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc. operates within the broader industry positioning of Amazon, which on official company sources identifies itself as a technology company that operates in e-commerce, cloud computing, digital content, and consumer electronics. The subsidiary’s work aligns with those areas by focusing on technology development and operational engineering that underpin Amazon’s public-facing services and internal platforms. Official Amazon communications highlight continuous investment in product innovation, infrastructure, and customer experience improvements; the activities of development centers and engineering subsidiaries are core enablers of those investments. In practical terms, the development center serves as a hub for multidisciplinary engineering teams that apply modern software-development practices, cloud-native architectures and machine learning methods to solve large-scale problems. Typical operational emphases include building distributed systems with high availability, implementing secure and compliant data-handling practices, optimizing latency and throughput for customer transactions, automating deployment pipelines and monitoring, and using data-driven experimentation to inform product decisions. While Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc. is a legal corporate entity with administrative and operational responsibilities, its identity and output are tightly integrated with Amazon’s global product and service ecosystem. The value proposition of the center lies in providing specialized engineering capacity and localized operational capabilities that accelerate the creation, iteration and delivery of software and services that support Amazon’s customers, sellers, partners and internal stakeholders. As with other Amazon development centers, the subsidiary contributes to both feature development and the foundational technologies that enable Amazon’s large-scale commerce, cloud and device businesses. For public inquiries and general information about Amazon’s corporate structure, product lines and corporate mission, Amazon’s official corporate communications and website provide primary documentation. Amazon publicly states its overarching mission and describes its principal business segments and technology investments, which contextualize the role that U.S.-based development centers and subsidiaries play within the company’s broader strategy and operations.

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