Systems Engineer, AWS Incident Response

Amazon is hiring a Systems Engineer, AWS Incident Response in Seattle, United States. It pays $105k-$160k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.

Level's read on this job

Uses AI ●●○○ is how Level rates this role: an ordinary role that requires AI tools.
The posting mentions Python, AWS and incident response among its tools and skills.
Level classes it as a mid-level role.
Amazon has 20,000+ other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Lead AWS incident response and apply automation, scripting, and generative AI to accelerate mitigation and reduce toil.

PythonAWS

incident-responsedistributed-systemsautomationgenerative-ai

As a Systems Engineer on AWS Incident Response, you will be on the front line of AWS incident response. You will lead high-severity calls, triage complex failures across distributed systems, coordinate resolver teams, and drive incidents to mitigation in real time while millions of customers depend on the outcome. Between incidents you will obsess over metrics and detection analysis, building dashboards and mechanisms that surface problems before customers notice, and you will drive operational improvements that make the incident management ecosystem faster and more accurate.

You will make real-time decisions under pressure, deep-diving the largest and most complex technical environment in the world. You will develop expertise across AWS services, networking, and infrastructure, building a breadth of knowledge that few roles offer. Your scope spans all of AWS rather than a single service. You will own operational processes end to end and use data to find the next improvement in how we detect and mitigate faster. You will also have the opportunity to grow your development skills by taking on coding projects that accelerate incident response and reduce toil.

This role includes participation in an on-call rotation covering weekdays, weekends, and holidays. On-call shifts fall within your local daytime hours.

Key job responsibilities
- Lead high-severity incident response calls end to end: assess impact, coordinate resolvers across AWS service teams, communicate clearly under pressure, manage escalations, and drive the incident to mitigation with documentation throughout.
- Own and run operational health reviews, and build and maintain the dashboards, metrics, and monitoring that surface trends before they become incidents.
- Improve detection accuracy and speed. Identify patterns across events and build proactive mechanisms that prevent recurrence.
- Deep-dive operational data to find systemic issues, measure response effectiveness, and prioritize improvements against what the data shows is degrading.
- Identify gaps in operational processes, documentation, and tooling, and build or improve mechanisms that reduce time-to-detection and time-to-mitigation.
- Apply scripting, automation, and generative AI to accelerate incident response and reduce toil, including where AI can augment human judgment during an incident or surface insight from operational data at scale.
- Work with service teams so that learnings from each incident drive corrective actions to completion, closing the loop between what broke and what gets fixed.
- Mentor peers in your areas of technical and operational strength.

A day in the life
When you are on call, incidents take priority. You join the incident bridge, assess the scope of impact from real-time metrics and dashboards, engage the resolver teams that own the affected services, and drive the event to mitigation, escalating when progress stalls. Off-call, you work to reduce time-to-detection and time-to-mitigation: deep-diving recent events for detection that lagged the impact or alarms that trigger without customer impact, correcting the signal behind them, leading operational health reviews, driving other teams' corrective actions to completion, and owning projects that strengthen AIR's detection and incident management, including automation you can build yourself.

About the team
AWS Incident Response (AIR), part of the AWS Resilience organization, ensures high availability of AWS. When major incidents hit, AIR leads the response, coordinating resolver teams across AWS and driving mitigation. We move fast, but not carelessly, obsessing over observability of the cloud and continuously improving our detection and response speed and accuracy. Each incident feeds improvements to our detection, processes, and tooling, making the next one shorter or preventing it entirely. This is a high-visibility, high-impact role with a global view of AWS health that few teams get to see.

Basic qualifications

- 3+ years of systems engineering, or 3+ years of technical support experience
- Experience in written and verbal communication skills to communicate with technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership
- Experience scripting in one or more language (e.g. Bash, Python, Perl, Ruby), or experience scripting in modern programming languages
- Understanding of operating systems (Linux), networking fundamentals, and distributed systems
- Experience with operational monitoring, alerting, and metrics (CloudWatch, Datadog, Grafana, or equivalent)
- Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot complex technical problems spanning multiple systems or services

Preferred qualifications

- Familiarity with incident management tooling and workflows in a large-scale production environment
- Experience with AWS services and cloud infrastructure
- Experience using generative AI or automation to solve operational problems or accelerate workflows
- Track record of authoring post-incident analyses (post-mortems) and driving corrective actions to completion
- Experience building operational dashboards, runbooks, or automation that improved team efficiency
- Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code and deployment tooling, such as CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, or similar
- Experience coordinating across globally distributed teams and time zones
- Comfort operating with ambiguity and incomplete information, and a self-starting approach to identifying what needs doing

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

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, WA, Seattle - 104,500.00 - 160,000.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Systems Engineer, AWS Incident Response at Amazon rates 45 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Uses AI (AI Level 2 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Uses AI. An ordinary role that requires AI tools.

●●●● 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. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Systems Engineer, AWS Incident Response is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 2 of 4: Uses AI.
The listed salary is $105k-$160k a year.
The role is based in US, WA, Seattle.
The job was posted on September 15, 2026.
Seniority: mid.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Incident ResponseDistributed SystemsAutomationGenerative AIPythonAWS

Questions you could be asked

Tell me about a project where incident response was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where automation was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where generative ai was part of your work. What did you do?
Walk me through how you've used Python in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Incident Response, Distributed Systems, Automation, Generative AI, and Python. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Put the AI tool in a bullet point about what you did, not just in a skills list. This role treats it as a required part of the job.

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