AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) is forming a new team in Seattle with a bold mission: dramatically reduce the time it takes for containerized workloads to become ready to run on Fargate. The vast majority of customer tasks are short-lived, making launch speed one of the most impactful levers for customer experience — and we're going after a step-function improvement.
As an SDE on the Workload Optimization team, you'll work at the intersection of container runtimes, operating systems, and networking to optimize the end-to-end launch path. This is deep systems work with direct, measurable customer impact at enormous scale.
Key job responsibilities
- Build and optimize container startup and runtime systems using Linux kernel, containerd/runc, and Bottlerocket
- Design and implement solutions across the container networking and instance preparation stack
- Work on one of the highest-scale container orchestration platforms in the world
- Join a founding team with greenfield ownership and the opportunity to shape technical direction from day one
About the team
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) makes it easy for customers to run, scale, and secure containerized applications on AWS. ECS powers some of the most demanding workloads on the planet — from startups launching their first container to enterprises running millions of tasks across global infrastructure.
The Workload Optimization team is a brand-new team within ECS, based in Seattle, with a focused mission: fundamentally reduce the time it takes for a containerized workload to become ready to run on AWS Fargate. For the vast majority of Fargate customers, launch latency is one of the biggest factors in their end-to-end experience — and we believe a step-function improvement is achievable.
This is a greenfield team, which means you won't be inheriting legacy systems or processes — you'll be building from scratch. You'll work deep in the systems stack (Linux kernel, container runtimes, OS, networking) alongside a small, senior group of engineers who care deeply about performance, correctness, and customer impact at scale.
We value engineers who think from first principles, are comfortable with ambiguity, and are energized by hard problems that don't have obvious solutions. Our culture is direct, low-ceremony, and high-ownership — you'll have real influence over what we build and how we build it from day one.
