Software Development Manager, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Description

Job Summary
Kubernetes only gets useful once you add things to it: networking, storage, DNS, observability, cert management, AWS resource control. Our team is how Amazon EKS customers get all of that without operating any of it: EKS add-ons and EKS capabilities, installed, upgraded, healed, and security-scanned by us, on live clusters, in every AWS region and partition.

We're hiring a Manager III, Software Development in Seattle to lead that team. You'll own three connected problems: the operator that reconciles add-ons onto customer clusters and repairs them when they drift; the release supply chain that takes an add-on from a partner team's commit to a globally available, CVE-scanned version; and the newest layer: Managed AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) and kro, where AWS runs the controllers so customers can manage AWS resources from Kubernetes without babysitting the controllers themselves.

- High blast radius, high leverage: an add-on change lands on running production clusters, so correctness and rollout safety are the design constraints, not an afterthought
- You're upstream and downstream of everyone: AWS service teams ship add-ons through your pipeline, and your operator is what actually puts them on customer clusters
- Real open source: ACK and kro are public projects; the team works in the upstream repos, not just around them

Key job responsibilities
- Own the team's charter, roadmap, and delivery for add-on lifecycle, add-on release, and managed ACK/kro capabilities, including the trade-off calls between new capability and paying down operational load
- Hire, grow, and retain SDEs across levels; set the bar for design review, code review, and on-call quality
- Raise release velocity for add-on partner teams while tightening the safety envelope: staged rollouts, bake time, automated validation, fast rollback
- Own operational excellence for a fleet-wide, multi-region, multi-partition service: alarms that mean something, dashboards leadership can read, COEs that produce fixes rather than paragraphs
- Drive the security supply chain for add-on images: scan coverage, time-to-patch, and holding the line with provider teams on CRITICAL/HIGH findings
- Partner with PM and adjacent EKS teams (control plane, connectivity, the internal cluster platform the capability controllers run on) on cross-team designs and launches
- Represent the team in upstream ACK/kro and EKS add-on community work, and in customer and service-team escalations

A day in the life
You start with the health of a system that is always mid-flight: overnight reconciliation and canary signal, an alarm from one region, a partner team's release stuck in a rollout wave. You spend the morning making those either fixed or owned, and asking why the system needed a human at all.

Then the design work. An engineer wants to change how the operator detects drift; another is proposing how a managed controller gets scoped credentials to touch a customer's AWS resources. You review the doc, push on failure modes, and cut scope so it ships in a quarter rather than a year.

Afternoons are the seams between teams. An AWS service team wants their add-on GA'd in a new partition. A container security review needs an answer on patch latency. Your PM wants to know what the roadmap costs if you also take on the next capability type. You have 1:1s, you write, and you fight for the two or three things that actually matter this quarter.

Your customers are both external and internal: EKS customers running these add-ons in production, and the AWS service teams and open-source partners who ship through your pipeline.

About the team
We're the add-ons and capabilities team inside Amazon EKS, based in Seattle. Our mission is simple to state and hard to do: everything a customer adds to their cluster should be installed correctly, upgraded safely, patched fast, and boring to operate.

Culturally we're a code-is-truth team. Designs are written down and argued about; assumptions get checked against the source and against production rather than asserted; the person who finds the sharp edge is expected to file it down, not just report it. On-call is shared and taken seriously, and we treat operational pain as a design bug. We work in public repos alongside upstream maintainers, which keeps the standard honest.

Basic Qualifications

- 3+ years of engineering team management experience
- 7+ years of working directly within engineering teams experience
- 3+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services experience
- Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and livesite operations
- Experience partnering with product or program management teams

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy
- Experience in recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers

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 - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually