Software Development Engineer, Sahale

Amazons Big Data Technologies (BDT) organization builds the data platform that connects millions of businesses of all sizes to hundreds of millions of customers across Amazon marketplaces worldwide. The PartiQL/HubSchema team sits at the heart of this platform: we build the query language schema modeling and data validation technologies that make exabytes of data discoverable trustworthy and queryable across Amazon.

We own PartiQL Amazons open-source SQL-compatible query language for semi-structured and nested data and HubSchema Amazons unified schema modeling and operation solution. HubSchema implements a hub-and-spoke architecture with a canonical schema model that serves as the universal intermediary for schema operations - conversion validation and compatibility analysis - across diverse compute and storage systems including AWS Glue Andes (Amazons data catalog) Apache Iceberg Apache Avro Parquet Redshift DynamoDB and more. When a BDT service needs to convert validate or reason about schemas HubSchema provides a single consistent answer - detecting type compatibility issues and data precision loss before an actual data transformation even occurs.

Our systems define how tens of thousands of datasets are modeled validated evolved and queried. HubSchema is integrated across the BDT ecosystem - Cradle (the data loading engine) Maestro (the orchestration platform) DataCraft v3 External Tables and Andes Views all rely on HubSchema converters to ensure consistent schema interpretation and unified conversion logic. We are actively driving adoption across remaining BDT services and eliminating legacy schema definition approaches in favor of a single unified standard (Andes Schema Spec v1.1).

We are looking for a passionate and innovative engineer with a solid technical background to join the team. You will design and build core language and schema infrastructure used by virtually every data producer and consumer at Amazon:

- Extending HubSchemas canonical model and spoke converters to support new storage formats and compute engines
- Evolving the PartiQL specification its Kotlin/JVM and Rust implementations and runtime performance for latency-sensitive use cases
- Building schema validation conversion and compatibility-checking services that guard data quality at Amazon scale
- Delivering HubSchema service APIs that power schema operations across the BDT platform
- Contributing to PartiQL as an open-source project

The successful candidate will have a background in building distributed systems or data infrastructure strong computer science fundamentals good communication skills and the motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. Experience with query engines compilers type systems data serialization formats or schema management is a strong plus - but curiosity and rigor matter more than prior exposure to any specific technology.

Key job responsibilities
- Design implement and operate core components of PartiQL and HubSchema used across Amazons data platform
- Build and extend HubSchema spoke converters (Iceberg Avro Parquet Glue Redshift Ion) and the canonical schema model
- Develop schema validation and compatibility APIs that detect type mismatches precision loss and breaking changes before they reach production
- Enhance PartiQL runtime performance (lazy evaluation async execution zero-copy Ion integration) for latency-sensitive consumers
- Drive HubSchema integration across BDT services replacing legacy one-off conversion logic with unified library converters
- Contribute to the open-source PartiQL specification and reference implementations
- Collaborate with partner teams across BDT (Catalog Compute Cradle Maestro DataCraft) to deliver end-to-end customer experiences
- Raise the bar on operational excellence testing and engineering quality for systems in the critical path of Amazons data ecosystem


About the team
The Sahale team owns PartiQL and HubSchema - the query language and schema technologies at the foundation of Amazons data platform. We are a team of engineers who care deeply about language design type systems and data correctness at scale. Our work is unusual in the best way: we operate open-source projects with an external community publish a formal language specification and ship libraries and services that virtually every data producer and consumer at Amazon depends on. If you want your code to be in the critical path of exabytes of data this is the team.

Why BDT
The Business Data Technologies (BDT) organization exists to serve Amazons growing analytics needs. BDTs mission is to accelerate Amazons data-driven business enable the next generation of analytics and machine learning technologies at scale and raise the bar on global customer trust by cataloging protecting enriching and brokering all SDO data through its lifecycle. Our teams develop and evolve services for storage and access to the authoritative repository of all data published by source teams across Amazon - enhanced with aggregations and transformations for use by consuming teams using modern compute services. BDT enterprise data products are available through DataCentral the one-stop hub for data analytics tools at Amazon spanning the Andes data catalog ingestion processing egress compliance and infrastructure. The problems here are genuinely hard: schema evolution across tens of thousands of datasets query processing over semi-structured data and unifying data experiences across formats and engines - at a scale few organizations ever reach.

- 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
- Bachelors degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science Engineering Mathematics or a related field
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language

- 3 years of full software development life cycle including coding standards code reviews source control management build processes testing and operations experience
- Bachelors degree in computer science or equivalent

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status disability or other legally protected status.

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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 WA Seattle - 143700.00 - 194400.00 USD annually