Principal Engineer, AWS Athena and Glue ETL at Amazon
Bellevue, WA
$200,100–$311,200from the description
Jul 17, 2026
Bellevue, WA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A principal-level engineering role focused on the multi-tenant serverless compute platform underlying Amazon Athena and AWS Glue ETL. The work centers on compute orchestration, workload routing, latency reduction, and resource utilization across interactive SQL, Spark, and batch workloads processing billions of queries weekly. The role also carries broad organizational responsibilities: setting technical direction, driving architectural alignment across analytics service teams, and mentoring senior engineers.
Principal level · 15+ 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 1,500 people in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 1,150–1,950
Applicant volume Heavy — This req sits in a large pool with little in its requirements to thin it, and auto-apply tools fire at everything in the occupation. Applying early and leading with the rare skills below is what gets read.
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 posting lists three work locations — East Palo Alto, CA; New York, NY; and Bellevue, WA — with separate salary bands. The Bellevue/WA band ($200,100–$270,600) is used as the primary CBSA since Bellevue is the lowest-quoted location and the team is described as 'hubbing' there; the East Palo Alto band ($230,100–$311,200) is the highest. The comp fields reflect the full range across all locations ($200,100 min / $311,200 max).
The Bachelor's degree requirement is listed under Basic Qualifications but explicitly allows 'equivalent experience,' so no minimum degree is hard-gated.
The role carries genuine org-wide technical authority (driving architectural convergence across multiple AWS analytics services, representing the team in senior technical forums, mentoring Principal Engineers) — this is a true Principal-level IC role, not merely a Senior with a long experience requirement.
Skills such as 'distributed systems design,' 'multi-tenant compute platforms,' 'resource orchestration,' and 'large-scale data analytics platforms' are listed as required capabilities in the Basic Qualifications but name no specific named technology; they are captured as skills at the closest concrete level the JD supports.
Apache Spark, telemetry/observability, VPC networking, SQL analytics engines (Trino/Presto/Spark SQL), and data lake technologies (Apache Iceberg/Hive Metastore) all appear under Preferred Qualifications only.
AWS Athena and AWS Glue are the team's own products being built, not external skill requirements — they are not listed as candidate skills.
Ignored 3 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): multi-tenant compute platforms, resource orchestration, large-scale data analytics platforms.
Read the full posting
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