Software Dev Manager, Amazon EMR

Job description

Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) is AWS's cloud big data platform for running large-scale data processing workloads using open-source frameworks like Apache Spark, Hive, Trino, and Flink. EMR supports multiple deployment models — from fully serverless to customer-managed clusters — and processes petabytes of data daily for hundreds of thousands of active customers. Organizations across streaming, financial services, enterprise SaaS, and transportation rely on EMR's scale and performance for their most demanding analytics workloads.

We are looking for a Software Development Manager to lead one of the engineering teams within EMR's Workload Management organization. In this role, you will own the delivery, operational excellence, and talent development for a team building critical platform services — including workflow orchestration, interactive session management, identity and access control, or observability — that power every job and session across EMR's compute models.

You will work closely with senior engineering leadership, Principal Engineers, and peer SDMs to execute against a multi-year platform roadmap while maintaining the highest bar for availability and customer experience.

This is a hands-on leadership role that requires strong technical judgment, a bias for action, and a passion for developing engineers. You will be expected to go deep on distributed systems trade-offs, drive execution on complex cross-team deliverables, and build a team culture rooted in ownership and operational excellence

Key job responsibilities

- Lead a team software engineers delivering platform services for EMR's workload management layer, including workflow orchestration, session management, authentication, or observability.

- Own end-to-end delivery for your team's roadmap — from design through launch — ensuring high-quality, on-time execution of features that directly impact customer experience.

- Drive operational excellence for your team's services, including availability, latency, and durability targets, oncall health, and proactive operational improvements.

- Partner with Principal Engineers and Sr. SDMs to translate architectural vision into executable plans, making sound technical trade-offs and ensuring your team delivers against the broader platform unification strategy.

- Hire, develop, and retain strong engineering talent — set clear expectations, deliver meaningful feedback, and create growth paths that help engineers reach their next level.

- Collaborate with Product Management to understand customer needs, prioritize the backlog, and ensure your team's work delivers measurable customer impact.

- Drive engineering best practices including code reviews, design reviews, testing strategies, and CI/CD pipeline improvements to raise the bar on engineering velocity and quality.

- Participate in cross-team operational forums, ensuring your team maintains a strong operational posture.