Principal Engineer | Multiple Locations, USA, Global Specialty Recruiting Team

Amazon is hiring a Principal Engineer | Multiple Locations, USA, Global Specialty Recruiting Team in Seattle, United States. It pays $200k-$271k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.

Level's read on this job

Little AI ●○○○ is how Level rates this HR role: aI is not part of the work.
Pay on this posting starts 67% higher than the typical HR posting on Level.
Level classes it as a lead role.
Amazon has 22,000+ other open roles on Level.
This posting went up in the last few days.

AI in this role

At Amazon, Principal Engineers are both organizational leaders and hands-on builders. As Amazon’s most senior individual contributors, Principal Engineers work on our hardest problems, help establish technical standards and drive the overall technical architecture, engineering practices, and engineering methodologies for products that delight our customers. While many companies this size take their foot-off the gas pedal, at Amazon, it’s still Day 1. This startup mentality, does not admit the luxury of a conservative approach.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is one of the foundational services of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a cornerstone of modern cloud computing. Since launching in 2006, EC2 has provided secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud — giving customers virtual servers ("instances") with complete control over their computing resources and the broadest choice of processor, storage, networking, and operating system configurations.

Today, EC2 operates at extraordinary scale, serving millions of customers worldwide — from individual developers to the largest enterprises and public-sector organizations. It offers thousands of instance types optimized for virtually every workload, spanning general-purpose, compute-, memory-, storage-, and accelerator-optimized use cases across multiple CPU architectures (including AWS's own Graviton processors) and GPU-powered instances for large-scale AI and machine learning.

What the EC2 Organization Builds
Engineers in the EC2 organization work on some of the most technically challenging and high-impact systems in the industry, including:

Compute & virtualization — the virtual server platform that powers a vast portion of the internet, including the AWS Nitro System, AWS's custom hardware and lightweight hypervisor technology that delivers performance, security, and isolation at hyperscale.
Networking — high-performance networking infrastructure and services that move enormous volumes of traffic securely, reliably, and efficiently across the AWS cloud.
Custom silicon & hardware — purpose-built chips and hardware (such as Graviton and Nitro cards) that advance performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
AI & accelerated computing — next-generation instances engineered for training and serving large-scale AI models, with cutting-edge networking and GPU/accelerator capabilities.
Scalability, availability & operational excellence — the systems and tooling that keep these services fault-tolerant, highly available, and continuously improving at global scale.

If you have a background in developing large-scale distributed systems, or are a specialist in any of the following areas, we would love to review your application: compute virtualization, server provisioning and fleet management, high-performance data plane engineering, control plane and orchestration systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure at scale.

Key job responsibilities
As a Principal Software Engineer, you will:

Serve as a technical leader on our most demanding, cross-functional projects.
Functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straight-forward solutions.
Fully and completely understand system inter-dependencies and limitations.
Possess expert knowledge in performance, scalability, enterprise system architecture, and engineering best practices.
Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues and helping managers guide the career growth of their team members
Exert technical influence over multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience. You are a leader, builder and an operator.
Balance technical leadership and savvy with strong business judgment to make the right decisions about technology choices.

About the team
EC2 is foundational infrastructure that a significant share of the digital world depends on. The organization combines the pace and ownership of a startup with the scale and reach of AWS, giving engineers the rare opportunity to make decisions that impact customers globally. It's an environment built for people who want to solve hard, ambiguous problems in distributed systems, virtualization, networking, security, performance, and AI infrastructure — and to see their work operate at a scale few other places can offer.

Basic qualifications

12+ years of hands-on professional engineering development experience
Technical leadership and mentorship experience of engineering teams

Preferred qualifications

Deep hands-on technical expertise in at least one major technical area: large scale full stack development, building distributed systems, designing massive global networks, embedded systems or complex hardware

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.

USA, CA, San Diego - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually
USA, CA, Sunnyvale - 230,100.00 - 311,200.00 USD annually
USA, NY, New York - 220,100.00 - 297,700.00 USD annually
USA, VA, Herndon - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 200,100.00 - 270,600.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Principal Engineer | Multiple Locations, USA, Global Specialty Recruiting Team at Amazon rates 21 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Key facts

Principal Engineer | Multiple Locations, USA, Global Specialty Recruiting Team is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 1 of 4: Little AI.
The listed salary is $200k-$271k a year.
The role is based in US, WA, Seattle.
The job was posted on October 17, 2026.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon