Senior Database Engineer, Aurora and Open Source at Amazon
Redmond, WA
$167,800–$227,000from the description
Jul 10, 2026
Redmond, WA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role sits within the Aurora database service team, bridging engineering and customers on Aurora MySQL and Limitless Database. Day-to-day work involves diagnosing critical database escalations, contributing to feature design and testing, driving root-cause fixes, and building automation to improve service operations. It suits someone with deep relational database expertise who is comfortable working alongside software engineers across the full product lifecycle rather than managing databases for individual customers.
Senior level · 5+ years · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA · 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 15 people in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database administrators). range 4–25
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $141,668 (middle half $107,299–$183,601). 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 (6)
Two salary bands are listed: $167,800–$227,000/yr for East Palo Alto, CA and $145,900–$197,400/yr for Redmond, WA. The higher CA band is reported; the WA band is also on offer depending on location.
The role is explicitly described as NOT a typical DBA/DBE role — it sits embedded in the Aurora core database service team, bridging customer engineering, feature design, and open-source contribution. The SOC is a close call between 15-1242 (Database Administrators) and 15-1252 (Software Developers); the primary day-to-day work leans toward deep database expertise, escalation engineering, and feature co-design rather than general software development, so 15-1242 is chosen with 15-1252 as the runner-up.
The Basic Qualifications section omits 'years' on two of the five bullets ('5+ Knowledge of…' and '5+ Experience troubleshooting…') — these appear to be formatting errors in the original posting; they are treated as 5+ year requirements consistent with the surrounding bullets.
Aurora MySQL and Aurora Limitless Database are called out as the specific product focus; 'Aurora' is listed as a preferred skill since it appears only in the narrative/intro framing, not in the formal qualifications sections.
The AWS primary services requirement (EC2, ELB, RDS, VPC, Route53, S3) is listed as a single bullet under Basic Qualifications with a 3+ year qualifier; each service is emitted as a separate required skill.
Programming language experience (Ruby, Java, Python, C#) is listed under Preferred Qualifications with 3+ years; Python is used as the primary name with the others as alternatives.
Read the full posting
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