About this role
EC2 Spot is a cost-effective compute solution that enables customers running fault-tolerant or flexible workloads to access compute capacity at up to a 90% discount. In exchange, AWS can reclaim individual instances with a 2-minute notification. Spot allows AWS to monetize spare compute capacity, shaping demand and driving increased utilization and profitability across the EC2 fleet. Our customer base spans from individual developers to the world's largest enterprises. EC2 Spot sits at the intersection of capacity economics, dynamic pricing, predictive algorithms, and customer-facing APIs. We manage allocation strategies, pricing models, and capacity shaping mechanisms that directly impact AWS's bottom line and millions of customer workloads. You can find more details about Spot Instances here: [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot) As a Senior SDE on the EC2 Spot team, you will lead the design and delivery of software systems that operate at massive scale with high availability. You will own the architecture of your team's systems, drive multi-engineer projects from ambiguous problem statements to production-ready solutions, and ensure your team's software is well-designed, extensible, performant, and secure. You will work closely with economists, product managers, and peer engineering teams to translate business objectives into technical strategies. You will tackle problems where the customer need is understood but the technology approach is not yet defined — balancing constraints, reducing complexity, and setting your team up for long-term success. You will mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, and actively contribute to a culture of technical excellence across the Spot organization. Key job responsibilities As a Senior SDE, you will lead multi-engineer projects end-to-end — driving design, implementation, testing, deployment, and operational readiness for complex systems spanning multiple features and services. You will own your team's architecture, providing system-wide design guidance and ensuring solutions are simple, extensible, and built for scale. You will work on problems where the technology strategy is not yet defined: clarifying the problem space, evaluating trade-offs across competing constraints, and driving alignment on the path forward. You will partner closely with economists, scientists, product managers, and adjacent engineering teams to shape Spot's capacity allocation, pricing, and demand-shaping systems. You will set the standard for engineering excellence on your team — driving code quality, establishing robust operational practices (alarming, telemetry, runbooks, COE processes), and fostering a culture of technical rigor. Where your team's systems bottleneck innovation for others, you will identify root causes and drive changes, including influencing decisions made by other teams. You remain deeply hands-on: your personal coding practices are exemplary in code organization, clarity, simplicity, error handling, and documentation, and you write clear technical designs that bring alignment across engineering audiences. You will actively mentor and grow engineers on your team and across the organization — coaching, contributing to hiring, and providing career guidance. You lead and participate in design reviews, ensuring proposals fit the system's long-term direction. Through all of this, you balance speed of delivery with architectural durability, identifying one-way-door decisions and advocating for the right long-term solutions. A day in the life Your days blend deep technical work with collaborative leadership. You might spend the morning designing a new capacity allocation component, working through failure modes and scale considerations. In the afternoon, you lead a design review for a critical cross-team integration, asking the right questions and ensuring the proposal fits the system's long-term direction. You pair with a teammate to debug a subtle distributed systems issue, then review a junior engineer's code — leaving feedback that teaches, not just corrects. When operational events occur, you lead your team's response: diagnosing root causes, identifying systemic patterns, and driving architectural improvements that prevent recurrence. You balance urgency with long-term thinking — resolving today's issue while ensuring tomorrow's systems are more resilient. About the team Our team operates at the intersection of systems engineering and economics, solving problems that have no textbook answers. We are a group of experienced engineers who value intellectual rigor, honest technical debate, and building systems that work at planet scale. As a Senior SDE, you will be a technical leader on the team — driving architecture decisions, mentoring others, and helping shape our engineering culture. We are looking for someone who makes the engineers around them measurably better.