The AWS Networking Services & Edge organization owns the design, infrastructure and operation of AWS networking services. In other words, we're the people who keep the clouds running. We support the networking services across all AWS data centers and ensure customers have continual access to the innovation they rely on. We work on the most challenging problems, with thousands of variables impacting the networking eco system, and we're looking for talented people who want to help.

You'll join a diverse team of software, hardware, and network engineers, security experts, operations managers, and other vital roles. You'll collaborate with people across AWS to help us deliver the highest standards for safety and security while providing seemingly infinite capacity at the lowest possible cost for our customers. And you'll experience an inclusive culture that welcomes bold ideas and empowers you to own them to completion.

The AWS NAT Gateway team is looking for a Software Development Engineer for a critical part of its service that will deliver enhanced security and visibility capabilities. This team owns the external facing NAT Gateway service (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-nat-gateway.html) which is an important part of customer networking architecture. This is a balanced team of senior and junior engineers that has proven it can deliver very important features for our customers.

This engineer will work on a key part of the service, setting up the team culture, best practices, mentoring, and delivering on the product roadmap. The successful candidate will be comfortable dealing with ambiguity, be very customer-centric, and able to think big!

The ideal candidate will be passionate about the potential of cloud computing as well as about building great resilient, scalable, and high-performance distributed services. This candidate has thrived and succeeded in delivering high quality technology products/services in a rapid growth environment exhibiting abilities to prioritize well, communicate clearly and understand how to drive a high level of focus and excellence with a strong team. This person has a proven track record of building a culture centered on customer focus, efficient execution, high quality, rigorous testing, deep monitoring, and solid deployment practices. AWS in general, and this business in particular, operates on a very large scale and on critical workloads, so a passion and discipline around operational excellence is key. A high level of ownership and accountability is a must.

The enhanced NATGW capabilities will allow customers to have visibility and exert control over all internet-bound activities. NAT Gateway enables customers to connect their private subnet resources to the internet while maintaining security and control. The service provides centralized security controls to avert data leak threats, offering thorough visibility into outbound traffic patterns, along with authentication and destination filtering capabilities to ensure that you don't have unauthenticated or compromised workloads in your environment trying to leak data to untrusted destinations.

With a balanced team of junior and senior engineers and a healthy operational load, this team needs your help to balance the challenges of growing the team, providing operational and technical guidance and mentoring, and delivering amazing features. It's a fun team with an exciting future -- come to work hard, play hard, and change the world!

Key job responsibilities
AWS NAT Gateway protects customer workloads from network threats by tracking egress connections. As an SDE II on the NAT Gateway team, you will build and scale core services that process billions of packets daily across AWS regions.

What You'll Do:
- Design and implement high-performance NAT Gateway services that process customer traffic at scale
- Build distributed systems that deliver sub-millisecond latency while maintaining security
- Optimize packet processing pipelines to handle increasing traffic volumes
- Collaborate with security teams to implement new threat detection capabilities
- Participate in on-call rotation to ensure service availability

What We're Looking For:
- 3+ years of professional software development experience
- Strong programming skills in Java, C++, or Rust
- Experience building distributed systems or network services
- Understanding of networking protocols (TCP/IP, TLS, HTTP)
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent experience

About the team
The AWS NAT Gateway team builds and operates the core NAT gateway services and infrastructure that protects customer workloads from network threats. The team designs high-performance distributed systems that support billions of packets daily across AWS regions, delivering sub-millisecond latency while maintaining security. Engineers on this team solve complex challenges in packet processing, threat detection, and scalability. The proxy service processes customer traffic in real-time, blocking malicious activity before it reaches applications. This team's work directly impacts AWS customers' security posture, enabling them to run workloads safely in the cloud. The team collaborates closely with security researchers, network engineers, and service teams across AWS.