Software Development Engineer, Data Center Builder Tools in London

The Data Center Builder Tools team is looking for a seasoned, self-directed Software Development Engineer (SDE II) to help define AWS next generation real-time middleware and controls platform 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 on this team, you will set the technical direction for 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 at the boundary of software and hardware: you will own the architecture of the controls, the communication layer, and the protocol and cloud integrations that the entire platform is built on, and you will be the engineer others turn to for the hardest problems in real-time, distributed, and embedded systems.

As an SDE II on this team, you are a technical leader accountable for the architecture and long-term health of the controls and middleware platform, not just individual components. You will operate across multiple workstreams and teams, make the consequential design decisions, and remain deeply hands-on where it matters most.

• Architecting the platform, not just components: owning the end-to-end design of the controls and real-time middleware across embedded/edge controllers and the cloud, making the durable decisions on type systems, serialization, memory layout, schema evolution, and communication patterns that everything else depends on.
• Owning real-time correctness at system scale: reasoning about latency budgets, throughput, determinism, and failure modes across a distributed system adjacent to physical control loops, and setting the standards that keep those guarantees intact as the system grows.
• Raising the engineering bar broadly: establishing standards for testing (unit, integration, and on-hardware validation), performance benchmarking, operational excellence, and code quality, and holding the team to them through design and code review.
• Growing engineers: mentoring Junior SDEs, developing their technical judgment, and contributing as a strong interviewer and bar raiser in hiring.
• De-risking the hardest problems: personally diving into the highest-ambiguity, highest-impact technical challenges (new protocol integrations, performance-critical paths, cross-language data exchange) and bringing them to a proven, maintainable end state.

The ideal candidate is a software engineer with a track record of owning the architecture of complex software systems and delivering them to production. You have depth across several of: real-time or embedded systems, industrial automation platforms and hardware protocols, distributed systems, middleware/messaging (pub/sub, RPC), and cloud communication and the breadth to reason about how all of these fit together into a coherent platform. You are comfortable working close to the metal (memory, concurrency, serialization, timing) and setting direction at the system and organizational level. You influence beyond your own team, make sound decisions under ambiguity and hardware/timing constraints, and lift the engineers around you. Experience with Rust, C/C++, or Python, and with technologies such as industrial automation platforms, OPC-UA, DDS/Zenoh or similar real-time middleware, is a strong advantage.

AWS Infrastructure Services (AIS) owns the design, planning, delivery, and operation of all AWS global infrastructure. In other words, we’re the people who keep the cloud running. We support all AWS data centers and all of the servers, storage, networking, power, and cooling equipment that ensure our customers have continual access to the innovation they rely on. We work on the most challenging problems, with thousands of variables impacting the supply chain — and we’re looking for talented people who want to help.