Principal, Senior Principal and Distinguished Engineer, AWS Agentic AI

Agentic AI drives innovation at the forefront of artificial intelligence, enabling customers to transform their businesses through cutting-edge AI solutions. We build and deliver the foundational AI services that power the future of cloud computing, helping organizations harness the potential of AI to solve their most complex challenges. Join our dynamic team of AI/ML practitioners, applied scientists, software engineers, and solution architects who work backwards from customer needs to create groundbreaking technologies.

Role Overview

We are seeking exceptional Principal Engineers to join the Agentic AI organization at AWS. This requisition represents multiple opportunities across various teams building the next generation of AI agent platforms, services, and tools. As AI agents proliferate across the industry, AWS is at the forefront of this transformation, building the technical foundation that will make sophisticated multi-agent workflows accessible to developers worldwide. In these roles, you'll design, build, and scale systems that genuinely move the needle for customers — leveraging the latest AI-powered development tools to work faster, think bigger, and ship better. We're looking for Principal Engineers who bring rare technical knowledge, a builder's instinct, and the kind of curiosity that doesn't stop at "good enough."

What You'll Do

As a Principal Engineer in Agentic AI, you will be a hands-on technical leader tackling the hardest, most ambiguous problems in the rapidly evolving Generative AI space. You will:

• Deliver high-impact technical projects and architect software systems built to scale — leveraging cutting-edge AI-powered development tools to push the boundaries of what's possible.
• Build trend-setting AWS services in the Gen AI field, solving the hardest engineering challenges to enable machine learning powered solutions for customers
• Deliver strategic technical projects that have significant bottom-line impact on our business and competitive position
• Design and architect large-scale systems that are scalable, efficient, and fault tolerant as tier zero Amazon services
• Provide technical leadership by mentoring engineers and drawing from deep technical expertise to guide complex technical decisions
• Shape technology, product, and business in a fast-moving, startup environment within a large company
• Work across domains including compute, databases, networking, identity, and ML science teams

Depending on your background and interests, you may work on:

• AgentCore Platform: Building comprehensive, modular infrastructure for deploying and operating autonomous AI agents securely and at scale, including serverless runtime, memory, identity, gateway, and observability components
• Agent Orchestration: Developing sophisticated multi-agent coordination and workflow orchestration patterns, solving intrinsically hard problems in context management, state coordination, and autonomous system control
• Knowledge & Evaluation: Creating robust evaluation frameworks, knowledge retrieval systems, and augmentation services that power AI-driven solutions with accurate, context-aware information
• Security & DevOps: Implementing Shift Left Security by building intelligent security agents that perform application security engineering and penetration testing functions, preventing insecure code from reaching production
• Migration & Modernization: Accelerating enterprise modernization through agentic AI services that transform .NET, mainframe, and VMware workloads

Key job responsibilities
Deliver some of our most strategic technical projects and design new software systems at scale

Lead architecture and engineering strategy for critical AI agent platforms and services

Mentor engineers and provide leadership on complex technical issues

Work closely with product, engineering, and science leaders to drive innovation

Set technical direction for platforms critical to accelerating customers' agents to production

Balance technical expertise with strong analytical skills to make informed architectural decisions

Thrive in a dynamic environment where operational excellence and customer impact are paramount

About the team
This is a strategic initiative with AWS leadership visibility at the highest levels. You'll have the opportunity to:

Build and launch new AI services from the ground up

Learn state-of-the-art machine learning technology

Work with an exceptional group of product, engineering, and science leaders

Get in on the ground floor of a fast-growing business

Shape the future of AI while making meaningful impact for customers worldwide

Our teams have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures. We celebrate knowledge-sharing and mentorship, with senior members providing one-on-one mentoring and thorough, kind code reviews. We care about career growth and assign projects that help develop engineering expertise.

Basic qualifications

- 10+ years of design, development engineering experience.
- Experience collaborating across multiple organizations and influencing key outcomes.
- Experience as a technical leader of multiple concurrent projects, driving strategic technical decisions.

Preferred qualifications

- Experience designing, building & operating large scale, highly available, secure cloud infrastructure.
- Experience with AI software systems including Agents.

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, Bellevue - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually