Amazon Leo is Amazon's low Earth orbit satellite network. Our mission is to deliver fast, reliable internet connectivity to customers beyond the reach of existing networks. From individual households to schools, hospitals, businesses, and government agencies, Amazon Leo will serve people and organizations operating in locations without reliable connectivity.
We are looking for a Software Development Engineer to build and scale the services/cloud layer of VirtSat, Leo's virtual satellite simulation platform. VirtSat lets developers and automated pipelines across Leo create, provision, and test virtual satellites, ground gateways, customer terminals, and TT&C antennas on demand — replacing scarce physical hardware benches with cloud infrastructure that scales with the constellation.
You will own the simulation control plane: the APIs, orchestration workflows, and health systems that turn a single request into a fully provisioned, flight-software-running virtual satellite. Every Leo satellite software release is validated on this platform before launch, which means the availability and latency of the services you own directly set the pace at which the constellation ships software.
This is a distributed systems role on a platform with an unusual property: your dependencies are physical. You will build APIs whose correctness depends on certificate provisioning, hardware emulation, radio link simulation, and the flight software itself — and you will make that stack behave like a reliable, self-service service.
Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.
Key job responsibilities
* Own the entity lifecycle APIs — create, provision, power-on, and tear down virtual satellites, gateways, customer terminals, and antennas — and drive them to and past a 99.9% availability bar
* Design and evolve the orchestration layer: long-running state machines that coordinate provisioning across distributed dependencies where any step can fail on physics rather than code, and where partial failure must be recoverable rather than restart-from-scratch
* Own the service-side plugin framework — the published contract, registration, delegation, and result aggregation that lets subsystem owner teams define their own initialization, health validation, and provisioning logic without our team in the loop
* Build the health check aggregation API: a single call that returns per-subsystem health with every failure attributed to the team that owns it, so customers self-diagnose instead of paging an on-call
* Build and own continuous canaries that validate the full stack against a pre-production constellation on a fixed schedule, wired so that a failure cuts a ticket and pages automatically with no human in the detection path
* Integrate with certificate, identity, and entity-registry services — device identity generation at constellation scale, certificate lifecycle, namespace registration, and the calibration data that makes a virtual entity behave like its physical twin
* Drive down provisioning latency, currently measured in minutes at p90, through parallelization, image pre-baking, and eliminating serialized dependencies
* Own observability end to end — structured logging, embedded metrics, distributed tracing, and log centralization — with the specific goal that a customer can root-cause a failed run from logs alone without recreating it
* Scale the platform for concurrent multi-tenant use: capacity management across bare-metal pools, fleet-wide provisioning throughput, and cost per simulated entity
* Partner closely with the virtualization and emulation team that owns the host layer, with subsystem owner teams who build against your plugin contract, and with the test frameworks and release pipelines that are your highest-volume customers
A day in the life
This role is for a Software Development Engineer who will build new cloud services and APIs that manage customer devices such as applying software updates, telemetry, and self-healing. You will be building low-latency, highly scalable architecture that are critical to getting high quality internet service to customers.
About the team
You will join the VirtSat Platform team within Leo Developer Experience. The team owns VirtSat end to end — the simulation service control plane, the virtualization host layer, fidelity of the emulated subsystems, and adoption across Leo.
This role sits on the services side of that boundary. You will own the simulation service: its public APIs, its provisioning workflows, its plugin framework, its canaries and health checks, and its availability and latency posture. A sibling role owns the bare-metal virtualization layer beneath you; you own the contract between them.
Basic qualifications
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
- 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
- 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language
- Knowledge of AWS services including compute, storage, networking, security, databases, machine learning, and serverless technologies
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or related field
- Experience designing and evolving APIs, including backward compatibility and versioning
Preferred qualifications
- 3+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
- Experience with workflow orchestration for long-running, failure-prone processes — AWS Step Functions, Temporal, Airflow, or similar — including checkpointing and resume semantics
- Experience operating a service to a defined availability target: canaries, alarming, on-call, error budgets, and driving availability upward through measurement rather than heroics
- Experience with plugin, extension, or federated-ownership architectures where teams outside your own contribute code behind a contract you publish and version
- Experience with EC2 bare-metal, virtualization, or hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure
- Familiarity with PKI, certificate provisioning, or secure device identity at fleet scale
- Experience with observability at scale — structured logging, metric cardinality management, distributed tracing
- Familiarity with satellite systems, robotics, industrial control, or other cyber-physical test environments
- Experience with infrastructure as code and CI/CD for service deployment
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, Redmond - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually
Senior Software Engineer, AI Infrastructure
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