AWS Database Migration Service has migrated more than 1.5 million workloads to AWS, helping enterprises move from commercial databases (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2) to open-source Aurora and RDS (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
As a Senior Database Engineer on the DMS team, you will be a technical leader and the highest-severity escalation point for complex database migration and replication issues across multiple engines. You'll own the resolution of the hardest customer problems - the ones that require deep understanding of database internals, replication protocols, and the DMS engine's interaction with source and target systems. You'll set the standard for how the team investigates, diagnoses, and resolves production incidents, and you'll drive systemic improvements that prevent entire categories of issues from reaching customers.
This role sits at the intersection of deep database expertise and engineering leadership. You'll mentor DBE2s and SDEs, influence product direction based on patterns you observe across escalations, design test strategies that catch issues before customers hit them, and collaborate directly with Principal Engineers on architecture decisions. You'll also shape how the team leverages AI-powered diagnostic tooling to scale expertise across the organization - making every engineer more effective at database troubleshooting.
AWS Database Migration Service is a part of AWS Utility Computing (UC) which provides product innovations — from foundational services such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to consistently released new product innovations that continue to set AWS's services and features apart in the industry.
Key job responsibilities
Own resolution of the most complex customer escalations involving heterogeneous database migration and CDC replication - Oracle LogMiner/Binary Reader, SQL Server fn_dblog/CDC, PostgreSQL logical decoding, MySQL binlog parsing - across production environments
Lead root cause analysis for systemic issues: data corruption, silent data loss, crash patterns, and replication divergence. Drive fixes from diagnosis through code change through production deployment.
Set technical direction for database endpoint quality - identify patterns across escalations, define test coverage gaps, and drive product improvements that eliminate entire classes of customer issues.
Mentor DBE2s and SDEs on database internals, escalation methodology, and customer communication. Raise the bar on investigation quality and documentation across the team.
Design and validate migration strategies for large-scale customer engagements, including data validation approaches, CDC architecture, performance tuning, and cutover planning.
Collaborate with SDEs on the DMS replication engine (C/C++) - reading engine code to trace failures, proposing fixes, and validating that code changes correctly address database-level behavior.
Drive adoption and improvement of AI-powered diagnostic tools to scale database expertise across the team - reducing dependency on individual SMEs for escalation resolution.
Influence product roadmap based on customer escalation patterns —-translating recurring pain points into feature requests, PMA rules, and documentation improvements.
Contribute to on-call as a senior escalation point, providing guidance on the most complex incidents and ensuring quality resolution across all database engines.
A day in the life
You might start the day as the escalation point for a XXL customer experiencing Oracle CDC data corruption analyzing Binary Reader behavior against Oracle redo log formats, identifying a race condition in how DMS handles high-volume rollback transactions, and working with an SDE to produce a targeted fix. Mid-morning you're reviewing a junior DBE's investigation of a PostgreSQL logical decoding edge case, coaching them on how to correlate WAL positions with DMS checkpoint behavior. After lunch you're in a design review for the debugger integration, providing input on which escalation categories would benefit most from execution replay. You end the day analyzing the month's escalation patterns and drafting a proposal to add three new PMA rules that would have prevented 15% of this month's tickets.
About the team
Our team is dedicated to supporting new members. We have a broad mix of experience levels and tenures, and we're building an environment that celebrates knowledge-sharing and mentorship. Our senior members enjoy one-on-one mentoring and thorough, but kind, code reviews. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects that help our team members develop your engineering expertise so you feel empowered to take on more complex tasks in the future.
The DMS team operates across Dublin, Poland, and the US. We support migrations across Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and DB2 - more database engine diversity than almost any other team at AWS. We leverage AI extensively: from autonomous bug-fixing to an on-call agent that cuts troubleshooting time dramatically, and we're building the next generation of migration tooling that eliminates configuration complexity entirely.
Diverse Experiences
AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.
Why AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses.
Inclusive Team Culture
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Mentorship & Career Growth
We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.
Work/Life Balance
We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.
- Experience in Postgres, or experience in Oracle DB and experience troubleshooting and debugging technical systems
- Experience with at least one scripting language (shell, Python, Perl) and a procedural language for at least one database (PL/SQL, T-SQL etc.)
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
- Deep understanding of data replication with hands-on experience in CDC technologies (LogMiner, pgoutput, fn_dblog, binlog)
- Ability to read and reason about C/C++ or Java code for root cause analysis and collaboration with development teams
- Experience as the senior escalation point for complex database production incidents
- Experience supporting large-scale database migrations (thousands of databases, multi-tenant architectures, enterprise customers)
- Experience with memory debugging tools (GDB, core dump analysis) or willingness to develop this skill
- Experience influencing product development based on customer escalation patterns
- Experience building or contributing to automated test frameworks for database systems
- Experience leveraging AI/ML tools for operational efficiency (diagnostic agents, automated triage)
- Strong written communication - ability to document complex technical findings for customers, support teams, and engineering leadership
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