Senior Software Development Engineer, AWS Kubernetes, EKS Scalability
Amazon · Seattle, WA
$168,100–$227,400from the description
Jul 16, 2026
Seattle, WA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior engineering role on AWS's EKS Scalability team, focused on improving the performance and scale of the Kubernetes control plane through open-source contributions, benchmarking tooling, and upstream community engagement. Day-to-day work spans diagnosing Kubernetes scaling bottlenecks, contributing to projects like Karpenter and KIT, collaborating with SIG Scalability, and mentoring other engineers. Suits an experienced distributed-systems developer with a track record of technical leadership.
Senior level · 5+ years · Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 2,150 people in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 900–3,200
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $170,959 (middle half $135,720–$216,519). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role has no explicit level in the title ('Software Development Engineer' is implied by context); advertised seniority is treated as Unspecified. The 5+ years of experience and tech-lead/mentor expectations support a Senior classification.
Kubernetes, Docker/containers, Linux, etcd, and Kafka all appear only under Preferred Qualifications or in narrative/context sections — none are hard-gated in the Basic Qualifications block, which requires only general software development experience and design/architecture leadership.
The Basic Qualifications require 5+ years of professional software development experience AND 5+ years of design/architecture experience — both are role-level gates with no named technology, so they are captured in the overall years minimum (5) rather than as named skills. The 'programming with at least one software programming language' requirement is similarly technology-agnostic.
Mentoring junior engineers and tech-lead responsibilities are called out explicitly, but these are scope/responsibility signals (supporting the Senior band) rather than named technology skills.
Compensation is quoted as a base salary range of $168,100–$227,400 annually for Seattle, WA, with additional sign-on and RSU components noted but not quantified.
The posting mentions on-call responsibilities (approximately one week every two months).
Ignored 2 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): software development, system design.
Read the full posting
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