SDE II, Keya
Amazon
Denver, CO, USA
Description
Application deadline: Jun 9, 2026
The Keya team owns and operates the Customer Experience (CX) services that power AWS User Experience Products and Platforms (UXP2), Documentation, and SDKs within US Government dedicated cloud partitions. We are responsible for the scaling, reliability, and regional expansion of these services—ensuring that AWS's government customers have a seamless, secure, and performant experience across console, SDK, and documentation touchpoints.
Our work spans the breadth of AWS: from build automation and service operations to development of tools that accelerate region launches and maintain experience parity across dedicated cloud environments.
We are looking for a Software Development Engineer II to help us build, scale, and operate critical services that directly impact how US Government customers interact with AWS. You'll work on a collaborative, geographically distributed team that values autonomy, ownership, and technical depth.
The candidate selected must obtain and maintain a security clearance at the TS/SCI with polygraph. Upon start, the selected candidate will be sponsored for a commensurate clearance for each government agency for which they perform AWS work.
Key job responsibilities
- Build and scale distributed services – Design, develop, and operate massively scaled services that support AWS Customer Experience products across dedicated cloud partitions, collaborating closely with engineers across multiple disciplines
- Drive automation – Identify, design, and implement automation for operational processes, deployments, and infrastructure management to reduce toil and improve reliability
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues – Partner with engineers across AWS to diagnose, root-cause, and resolve customer-impacting issues in large-scale distributed systems
- Own operational excellence – Monitor service health, define and respond to alarms, maintain runbooks, and proactively identify and remediate problems before they impact customers
- Collaborate across AWS – Work alongside some of the leading minds in distributed systems, contributing to cross-team design reviews, architecture discussions, and best-practice sharing
- Own and drive product roadmaps – Take ownership of Keya's products and services roadmap, driving innovation from ideation through execution, and delivering measurable improvements to our customers' experience
A day in the life
No two days on Keya look the same—but here's what a typical day might look like:
You are a builder who thrives on solving real-world problems at scale. You're comfortable operating in ambiguity, you take ownership of outcomes (not just tasks), and you're energized by the challenge of keeping critical systems running reliably for customers who depend on them. You bring strong technical fundamentals, a bias for automation over manual work, and the curiosity to learn new systems quickly—because on Keya, you'll touch a lot of them.
You start your morning reviewing service dashboards and alarms, checking the health of the CX services your team owns across dedicated cloud partitions. After standup with your distributed team, you dive into a design document for a new automation that will cut a manual region-launch task from hours to minutes.
Mid-morning, you pair with a teammate to debug a latency spike in one of your APIs—tracing the issue across service boundaries, identifying a misconfigured retry policy, and pushing a fix through your CI/CD pipeline. After lunch, you join a cross-team architecture review with engineers from another AWS service team, providing input on how their changes will interact with your services in government partitions.
Later in the afternoon, you're writing code—maybe building a new CloudWatch alarm integration, extending an internal CLI tool, or implementing a feature on your team's roadmap. You wrap up the day by updating your design doc based on feedback from a senior engineer and queuing up a code review for tomorrow.
About the team
Why AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses.
AWS Infrastructure Services (AIS)
AWS Infrastructure Services owns the design, planning, delivery, and operation of all AWS global infrastructure. In other words, we’re the people who keep the cloud running. We support all AWS data centers and all of the servers, storage, networking, power, and cooling equipment that ensure our customers have continual access to the innovation they rely on. We work on the most challenging problems, with thousands of variables impacting the supply chain — and we’re looking for talented people who want to help.
Inclusive Team Culture
Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.
Work/Life Balance
We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud.
Mentorship and Career Growth
We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.
Diverse Experiences
Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.