Are you passionate about building services that help enterprises move to the cloud? AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) has migrated more than 1.5 million database workloads to AWS, and with a ton of enterprise databases still on-premises, the mission is far from complete. We are looking for a Software Development Manager to lead a team of engineers building and operating the core migration engine that powers heterogeneous database migrations from commercial sources (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase) to open-source Aurora and RDS (PostgreSQL, MySQL).
As an SDM on the DMS team, you will own the end-to-end delivery of a critical migration engine serving customers across hundreds of thousands of replication instances worldwide. Your team will be responsible for engine reliability (crash reduction, release quality), security compliance, customer escalation support, and feature delivery for strategic customer migrations. You'll drive a dual-track strategy: stabilizing and improving the existing engine (a million-line C/C++ codebase) while contributing to the next-generation migration service built on modern distributed Java architecture.
This role requires a leader who can balance competing priorities - security mandates, customer escalations, product quality, and roadmap delivery. You'll make hard trade-off decisions daily, drive operational excellence in a complex system, and build a team culture that leverages AI tooling to multiply engineering effectiveness.
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) 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. As a member of the UC organization, you’ll support the development and management of Compute, Database, Storage, Internet of Things (Iot), Platform, and Productivity Apps services in AWS, including support for customers who require specialized security solutions for their cloud services.
Key job responsibilities
Lead a team of 6-10 SDEs and DBEs building, testing, and operating DMS's core replication engine across multiple database endpoints (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, DB2).
Own release management for a 6-week deployment cadence serving 100K+ production instances, balancing customer fix delivery with fleet stability.
Drive crash reduction, test coverage improvement, and release quality initiatives
Manage customer escalation response for high-profile migrations, coordinating between engineering, support, and customer teams.
Make prioritization decisions across security compliance, customer delivery, and product roadmap - clearly communicating trade-offs to leadership.
Build and retain a high-performing team in a complex technical domain where onboarding takes 3-6 months per endpoint zone.
Drive adoption of AI-powered engineering practices (autonomous bug detection, AI-assisted on-call, automated test generation) to increase team velocity.
Partner with Principal Engineers and senior leadership on architecture decisions, deprecation strategy, and long-term migration service evolution.
Own operational metrics: on-call health, escalation rates, ticket volumes, deployment success rates, and customer satisfaction.
A day in the life
You might start the day reviewing overnight crash reports and on-call handoff notes, then join a customer sync for a large-scale migration engagement. Mid-morning you're making a prioritization call between a security mandate deadline and a customer-blocking fix, working with your PE to find a path that doesn't sacrifice either. After lunch you're reviewing CRs for crash fixes heading into the next release, then coaching an SDE through their first complex Oracle CDC escalation. You end the day in a planning session for the next release cycle, deciding which fixes go GA and which get delivered via private builds to unblock customers immediately.
About the team
About AWS
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- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field or equivalent
- Experience designing, building, operating, and managing large-scale distributed systems or web services
- Experience hiring, developing, and managing high-performing technical teams
- Experience in software development
- Experience managing teams of 5+ support engineers, including resource management, staffing, mentoring, and maintaining best-of-class global engineering teams
- Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy
- Experience in relational database technology (such as Redshift, Oracle, MySQL or MS SQL)
- Experience managing teams, or experience programming with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design
- Experience in operations of highly available and scalable internet systems with a large customer base
- Knowledge of database design and implementation or equivalent
- Experience migrating or transforming legacy customer solutions to the cloud
- Master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or related field
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