Sr. HDD Hardware Engineer, S3 Storage Hardrdware, OEM Drives

Application deadline: Sep 1, 2026 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Hardware Engineering team creates compute and storage server designs for Amazon’s innovative web services. Our designs are industry-leading in performance, frugality and operational excellence, and are critical to the success of the AWS business and the more than one million customers who use AWS today. Our Hardware Engineers solve challenging technology problems, and build architecturally sound, high-quality server platforms and components to enable AWS to realize critical business strategies. We are seeking experienced Hardware Design Engineers to build the next generation of our cloud systems. Our success depends on our highly respected server infrastructure; we’re handling massive scale and rapid integration of emergent technologies. Key job responsibilities As a member of the S3 Hardware engineering team, you will be responsible for bringing new HDD technology to our systems & products as well as scaling how we operate our massive existing & rapidly growing fleet. You will interact with engineers across the company, external vendors and work with an interdisciplinary team to execute product designs from concept to production including design, development, validation, and the successful implementation of your work at large scale. You’ll provide leadership in the application of new technologies to large scale server deployments in a continuous effort to deliver a world-class customer experience. This is a fast-paced, challenging position, and you’ll work with thought leaders in multiple technology areas. You’ll have high standards for yourself and everyone you work with, and you’ll be constantly looking for ways to improve your products performance, quality and cost. We’re changing an industry, and we want team members who are ready for this challenge and want to reach beyond what is possible today. A day in the life Your day begins by reviewing overnight fleet analytics dashboards that monitor millions of hard drives across AWS data centers worldwide. You analyze performance trends and anomalies, using data-driven insights to prioritize which system interaction issues require immediate attention and which represent opportunities for long-term optimization. This morning review shapes your focus for the day, balancing immediate operational needs with your strategic work advancing the next generation of storage technology. Approximately half of your time is dedicated to pioneering new technology initiatives that will define the future of cloud storage. You might spend your morning collaborating with hardware partners to land revolutionary HAMR laser-enabled HDDs into production, working through the complex qualification process that will eventually bring unprecedented storage density to AWS customers. In the afternoon, you could be evaluating breakthrough firmware capabilities that fundamentally change how drives perform, running extensive validation tests to ensure these innovations meet AWS's exacting standards before deployment at scale. You also push the boundaries of software-HDD interaction, architecting novel approaches that extract maximum performance and reliability from storage hardware in ways that weren't previously possible. These initiatives require you to think years ahead, anticipating how emerging technologies will enable AWS to continue delivering industry-leading storage solutions. The remainder of your time focuses on maintaining operational excellence across the existing fleet. You debug complex system interaction issues flagged by your automated monitoring, tracing root causes through layers of infrastructure to develop fixes that prevent similar problems across millions of devices. You continuously build and refine the automation frameworks, analytics tools, and scalable solutions that make managing a fleet of this magnitude possible. Every script you write and every system you architect multiplies your impact exponentially,