System Development Engineer, Bottlerocket

Job description

As a Systems Development Engineer on the Bottlerocket team, you will design, build, and operate the systems and infrastructure behind Bottlerocket, AWS's open-source, security-first container operating system trusted by thousands of customers to run production workloads at massive scale.

As a SysDE II, you will work in Rust and Go in the open on GitHub, building and automating the systems that produce and deliver the OS to millions of hosts worldwide: the build and packaging pipeline, the update and release mechanisms, image generation across variants and architectures, and the tooling that keeps delivery safe and repeatable. You will solve hard problems in Linux internals, security hardening, and performance at high container density, and own the CI/CD, observability, and release automation that make OS delivery fast, reliable, and rollback-safe.

This is a uniquely open team within AWS

real open source, an active community, and genuinely low-level systems engineering on infrastructure customers rely on to run their most important workloads.

Key job responsibilities

- Design, implement, and maintain Rust-based OS components including system services, API servers, and update infrastructure for Bottlerocket

- Own features end-to-end from design through production, operating with high autonomy and delivering results on ambiguous problems

- Contribute to and maintain open-source code on GitHub, participating in public code reviews and community engagement

- Investigate and resolve complex systems issues spanning kernel, userspace, container runtimes, and orchestrator integrations (EKS, ECS)

- Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, release tooling, and automated testing frameworks that ensure safe, rapid OS delivery

- Harden security defaults and implement OS-level protections that reduce customer operational burden without sacrificing flexibility

- Partner cross-functionally with EKS, ECS, and security teams to design integrations and align on container host requirements

- Mentor engineers through code reviews, design feedback, and technical guidance, raising the quality bar across the team

- Participate in on-call rotations and operational excellence practices supporting production container infrastructure at scale

- Write technical design documents, contribute to roadmap planning, and communicate trade-offs clearly to stakeholders