Senior Systems Development Engineer, Route 53

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 https://www.agsva.gov.au/. 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 one of the world's most critical DNS infrastructures resilient, self-healing, and world-class? As a Senior System Development Engineer within our Route 53 team, you'll help shape the technical direction of the DNS infrastructure that underpins an entire sovereign cloud region. Route 53 isn't just another DNS service — it's the nervous system of the internet, operating across 50+ global locations with a 100% availability SLA. The distributed systems you'll work on here are among the largest and most complex on the planet, and the challenges are the kind that make exceptional engineers come alive. Given the time-zone realities of operating a sovereign region, this senior role carries a level of independence and influence that goes well beyond a traditional service team position — you'll be a critical bridge between global Route 53 innovation and local, cleared execution, with the breadth of exposure across AWS services and DNS at scale to match. 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 Route 53's DNS infrastructure running within the programme — and you'll lead the engineering effort to continuously reinvent them to be more resilient, more automated, and more scalable. You'll own the dual mandate that defines this level: operational excellence today and engineering innovation for tomorrow. You'll own the health and reliability of critical DNS software systems, responding to operational events with the calm precision of someone who understands the architecture end-to-end — then going further to identify patterns in operational burden and engineer them away at scale, building automation that transforms manual runbooks into self-healing workflows and accelerates DNS change propagation. You'll write production-quality code daily and lead the design and implementation of DNS solutions that leverage Route 53's advanced capabilities — latency-based routing, Private DNS, Geo DNS, and zero-downtime failover architectures — along with monitoring and tooling that surfaces anomalies before they become incidents. You'll connect Route 53 with the broader AWS ecosystem, collaborating with global service teams to ensure seamless interoperability within a security-cleared, sovereign context. When technical issues arise, you'll lead the investigation — diagnosing at the code or systems level, performing root-cause analysis, implementing long-term fixes, and articulating technical requirements back to service owners with clarity and precision. When incidents arise, you'll lead with clarity and purpose; when the dust settles, you'll lead the retrospective that ensures the same issue never surfaces again. You'll mentor fellow engineers, guiding them through operational deep-dives and passing on the craft of systems thinking. You'll drive the architectural decisions that shape the programme's future and champion the operational best practices that raise the bar for the entire team. A day in the life Your morning begins with a scan of DNS system health dashboards — the overnight metrics tell a story, and you're fluent in reading it. You notice a subtle shift in query patterns across one routing policy; you investigate, trace it to a configuration drift, and push a fix before it becomes a customer-impacting event. That's the kind of proactive engineering that defines your approach. By mid-morning, you're deep in code. The automation framework you've been architecting is nearly ready — once deployed, it will reduce DNS change propagation time and eliminate a recurring operational task that currently consumes hours of engineering time each week. You push your changes through the CI/CD pipeline you helped build and kick off the test suite. After lunch, you join a design session with your team, sketching out a new Geo DNS architecture. The sovereign context adds fascinating constraints — you're solving for performance, sovereignty, security,