Director of Engineering, Amazon
Redshift, Analytics Engines
$297.5-350k
+ Equity
Office located in Palo Alto, CA
The largest online retailer and technology provider
Be an early applicant
The largest online retailer and technology provider
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$297.5-350k
+ Equity
Office located in Palo Alto, CA
1001+ employees
Company mission
To be Earth's most customer-centric company.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, Statistics or 12+ years equivalent experience
- 10+ years of software engineering experience
- 10+ years leading distributed engineering teams
- Experience with large-scale data systems or database technologies
Desirable
- 15+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years in a senior leadership role (Director or equivalent)
- Deep expertise in database internals, query processing, query optimization, or distributed execution engines
- Track record delivering complex, large-scale infrastructure or platform products at thousands-of-customers scale
- Experience leading globally distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones
- Demonstrated ability to drive cross-organizational alignment and influence technical direction across partner organizations
- Strong understanding of cloud architectures, data analytics patterns, and data lake/open-format ecosystems (Apache Iceberg, Parquet, or similar)
- Experience with query optimizer design, cost-based optimization, high-performance execution engines, or petabyte-scale workload management
- Background in AI/ML-powered systems, including large language models, agentic architectures, or natural language interfaces for data systems
- Track record building and shipping serverless or auto-scaling distributed data systems
- Experience collaborating across diverse analytics or data platform organizations (e.g., data catalog, ETL, query federation, ML platforms)
- Executive presence with excellent written and verbal communication skills, able to influence VP and C-level
- Published research or patents in databases, query processing, or related fields
What the job involves
- Amazon Redshift is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead the Redshift Engine Team, a global organization spanning the United States and Europe
- Amazon Redshift is the most widely used cloud data warehouse, powering SQL analytics on unified data across Redshift Managed Storage and open data lakes for tens of thousands of customers worldwide
- The team's vision: build the best SQL analytics engine for humans and agents over any data
- This is a rare opportunity to lead at the intersection of analytics, AI, and distributed systems at a massive scale
- The team owns the core query processing engine optimization, high-performance execution, catalog, Exabytes of managed storage, and leading-edge autonomics and is innovating across serverless scale-up/scale-out, automated cluster management, AI-driven scaling, zero-ETL integrations, an integrated data lake query engine, and natural-language analytics via Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases
- As Director, you will own the technical strategy and execution for the engine, shape how AI agents interact with Redshift for intelligent query generation and optimization-aware execution, lead a globally distributed organization, and drive cross-organizational collaboration with partner services including Glue Data Catalog, EMR, Athena, and SageMaker Unified Studio
- Define and drive the long-term technical vision for the Redshift query engine as the industry-leading SQL analytics engine for human users and AI agents alike including how autonomous and agentic workloads interact with the engine for intelligent query generation and optimization-aware execution
- Lead and grow a globally distributed engineering organization across the US and Europe, fostering a culture of operational excellence, innovation, and ownership
- Own the architecture and roadmap for query optimization, high-performance execution, scalable catalog, cost-based planning, storage, and self-tuning systems including next-generation solutions for transactional data warehousing and elastic query processing over open-format data at scale
- Drive cross-organizational collaboration across partner services (Glue Data Catalog, EMR, Glue, Athena, SageMaker Unified Studio), building consensus on shared architecture and delivering outcomes that span team charters
- Champion performance and price-performance leadership across serverless, automated cluster management, and real-world customer workloads
- Partner with AI/ML and science teams to advance natural language-to-SQL capabilities and integrate generative AI into the analytics experience
- Build and maintain relationships with strategic customers, incorporating feedback into the engine roadmap
- Establish engineering best practices, mentoring programs, and career development frameworks for a high-performing global team
Our take
Amazon is the world's largest online retailer, and is well-known for its disruption of well-established industries. The company is present in numerous verticals, including cloud computing with Amazon Web Services, AI with its range of Alexa devices and a global marketplace more commonly referred to as 'the everything store'. Acquisitions include Ring, Twitch, Whole Foods Market, and IMDb.
More recently, Amazon has been focused on leading the "third wave in digital advertising". Many businesses are now shifting ad dollars to retailers, which before would have been spent with online media platforms. Amazon's seen great success in the space, with its revenue from advertising now higher than its Amazon Prime membership scheme, audiobooks and digital music combined. This growth is particularly impressive considering its digital ad rivals (like Snap, Alphabet, and Meta) have suffered declines due to wider macroeconomic factors and Apple's iOS privacy changes.
Despite its dominant market position, Amazon will continue to be challenged over the next decade, including sustaining AWS's cloud dominance in the face of Google and Microsoft. On top of this, the company's e-commerce division is facing profitability problems despite its 2023 post-IPO debt funding of 8 billion. It will need to find new ways to stay above their competitors.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
16% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
South Lake Union, Seattle, WA
Leadership
Jeff Bezos
(Founder & Executive Chairman)Jeff is an American business magnate, media proprietor, and investor. As well as founding Amazon, Jeff founded Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company and also owns The Washington Post.
Andy Jassy
(President & CEO)Joined Amazon as a Marketing Manager in 1997. Developed AWS with Jeff Bezos, and became CEO of Amazon in 2021.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 221 more jobs at Amazon