Senior System Development Engineer

G'day! You've found an opportunity that could define your next chapter. Applicants must be Australian citizens and hold or be eligible to obtain an Australian Government Security Clearance with the ability to successfully complete an Organisational Suitability Assessment. More information regarding security clearances can be found at AGSVA. Based in Sydney or Melbourne — we offer relocation support for candidates moving from other states.

The Mission - Why This Program, Why Now? You're joining at the defining moment of one of the most significant technology programmes Australia has ever undertaken. This programme will build and operate the dedicated cloud giving Australia's national security community and its allies the capability to see more, share more, innovate and act faster than ever before. The architectural decisions being made now - how we structure networking, implement security controls, and automate at scale - will shape how Australia's national security community operates for the next decade. You won't be inheriting someone else's design choices. You'll be making them.

Your Opportunity: What if you could not only build the cloud, but lead the engineering that makes it resilient, self‑healing, and world‑class? As a Senior System Development Engineer in Core Networking, you'll be the driving force behind the software services and platforms that build, operate, monitor, and assure the network within an entire region — and you'll set the technical direction for how those systems evolve. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering leadership and operational excellence.

Benefits:

• Learning & development - AWS training and certification support, access to internal learning platforms.
• Health, income protection and life cover - Amazon subsidises private health insurance premiums, and group salary continuance and life insurance are included at no cost to you.
• Military differential pay launching in Australia - Australian employees taking defence reserve leave may receive up to 52 weeks of military differential pay to help cover the difference in pay while serving.
• Employee Assistance Program - Free, confidential support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for you and your family - mental health, financial coaching, legal questions, and everyday life events.
• Family‑building benefit - Access to Maven for fertility treatment, adoption support, surrogacy, and parenting coaching.
• Amazon Extras & employee discount - cashback and discounts across hundreds of retail, fitness, travel, and lifestyle partners.

Key job responsibilities: You'll own the software services and platforms that keep the AWS network running within the region — and you'll lead the engineering effort to continuously reinvent them to be more resilient, more automated, and more scalable. Your dual mandate — operational excellence today and engineering innovation for tomorrow — means no two weeks look the same. You'll own the health and reliability of critical network software systems, responding to operational events with the calm precision of someone who understands the architecture end‑to‑end. But you won't stop at firefighting. You'll identify patterns in operational burden and engineer them away, building automation that transforms manual runbooks into self‑healing workflows.

A day in the life: Your morning begins with a health check across the services your team owns — reviewing deployment pipelines, scanning monitoring dashboards, and confirming that overnight automated processes completed successfully. A minor anomaly catches your eye; you investigate, trace it to a configuration drift in a network service, and push a fix before it becomes a customer‑impacting event. That's the kind of proactive engineering that defines your approach.

About The Team: The Systems Development team manages all of the software services and platforms that builds, operates, monitors and assures the AWS network within entire regions. We design and implement automation and new software solutions to improve operational efficiency on behalf of our Network Engineer customers.

Diverse Experiences: AWS 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.

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.

Inclusive Team Culture: AWS values curiosity and connection. Our employee‑led and company‑sponsored affinity groups promote inclusion and empower our people to take pride in what makes us unique.

Mentorship & 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.

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.

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of deploying and operating in a Linux/Unix environment experience
• 5+ years of systems development in an IT or data center environment experience
• 3+ years of systems design, software development, operations, automation, and process improvement experience
• 3+ years of programming with at least one modern language such as C++, C#, Java, Python, Golang, PowerShell, Ruby experience
• Experience leading the design, automation, deployment, and support of large-scale infrastructure

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with distributed systems at scale
• Experience in mentoring, leading, or managing more junior engineers
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines build processes
• Experience in networking, storage systems, operating systems and hands‑on systems engineering
• Experience building tools for building, testing, releasing or monitoring

Acknowledgement Of Country: In the spirit of reconciliation Amazon acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.

IDE Statement: 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.