Principal Software Engineer, AWS CloudWatch

Come build the next generation of cloud observability with us. Amazon CloudWatch gives every AWS customer a single platform to send, store, and query metrics from over 70 AWS services alongside their own application telemetry, using OpenTelemetry (OTLP) and PromQL — and the same platform powers observability for Amazon's internal teams and the new CloudWatch Omni experiences. As the Principal Engineer for the CloudWatch metrics platform, you will own its technical vision and architecture end to end — the distributed query engine, the tiered storage and long-term retention systems, and the ingestion and compaction pipeline — and drive its evolution for the OpenTelemetry era. We will look to you to make high-judgment architectural trade-offs across latency, cost, durability, and scale, to set the multi-year technical strategy, and to raise the technical bar across our Dublin engineering team and the wider CloudWatch organization.

• Key job responsibilities
• Set the multi-year technical vision and architecture for the CloudWatch metrics platform — query execution, tiered and long-term storage, and ingestion — and drive it across multiple teams.

Own the hardest design decisions on correctness, availability, performance, and cost for a globally available 24x7 service that customers rely on to monitor, alert on, and analyze their systems in real time.

Lead the evolution toward intelligent, adaptive ingestion and make the platform the default OpenTelemetry metrics foundation across Amazon.

Work backwards from customers — AWS customers, Amazon internal teams, and the Omni experiences — to influence the roadmap and shape how millions of developers and SREs monitor their systems.

Raise the engineering bar through design and code reviews, operational excellence, and deep dives into the most complex production issues, applying durable fixes.

Mentor and grow senior engineers, and represent CloudWatch metrics in AWS-wide architecture forums and the broader OpenTelemetry/Prometheus community.

• A day in the life
• On a typical day you might set direction on a hard architectural trade-off in the query engine or storage tiers, deep-dive a customer-impacting performance issue to its root cause, review a senior engineer's design for a storage or compaction challenge no one has solved before, or work with product and leadership to drive this years goals and or iterate on our multi-year roadmap. You translate customer needs into architecture, break ambitious goals into incremental deliverables teams can ship, and are the engineer other principal and senior engineers come to for direct feedback on the hardest problems.

Basic qualifications

10+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.

10+ years designing and architecting new and existing large-scale distributed systems, including design patterns, reliability, and scaling.

Relevant experience in high-performance storage, time-series/metrics systems, query engines, or database internals.

Experience setting technical direction across multiple teams and delivering step-function improvements to systems at scale.

Preferred qualifications

Deep familiarity with time-series data, metrics systems, and the Prometheus and OpenTelemetry ecosystems.

Experience with S3-based storage, stream processing (e.g., Kinesis, Kafka), and columnar formats such as Parquet.

Experience with PromQL or other time-series query languages, query planning, storage compaction, and performance optimization at scale.

Systems programming experience in Rust, Java, C++, or similar.

Experience influencing architecture across organizations and mentoring senior engineers.

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