Software Development Manager, AWS Identity, IAM Data Plane - Credentials Distribution Systems

What does it take to distribute billions of security credentials every day - without ever going down? That's the challenge at the core of this role.

As a Software Development Manager on the AWS Credentials Distribution Systems (CreDS) team, you'll lead a high-impact team responsible for tier-0 infrastructure that every AWS compute platform depends on. Your systems power IAM Roles for EC2, EKS, ECS, and more - making ephemeral, least-privilege credentials the default across AWS. You'll work closely with AWS service teams and product management to define, prioritize, and deliver features that drive meaningful security improvements for customers at scale.

This is a deeply technical team that thrives on operational excellence and a culture of strong ownership. The ideal candidate holds themselves and their team to the highest engineering standards - proactively identifying risks, driving continuous improvement across operational metrics, and ensuring systems are reliable and scalable. If you're passionate about distributed systems, cloud security, and owning outcomes end-to-end, this is the role for you.

Key job responsibilities
- Define and deliver on the long-term product and architecture strategy for temporary security credential management and distribution
- Drive customer-facing impact by working backwards from customer needs to simplify credential management
- Proactively identify risks, mitigate them before they become roadblocks, and exercise sound judgment on when and how to escalate to senior leadership
- Set team strategy and be accountable for team plans, execution, and deliverables - ensuring consistent, high-quality outcomes
- Own and continuously improve all operational metrics and automation tools, ensuring your team's software is reliable, efficient, and scalable
- Build strong partnerships with Product Managements to align on priorities and drive cross-functional execution
- Collaborate cross-functionally with AWS service teams to define and deliver on security and adoption goals
- Make / facilitate prioritization decisions and manage trade-offs between short-term delivery and long-term architectural health
- Leverage AI tooling to improve engineering productivity, automate workflows, and raise the bar on operational efficiency
- Grow and develop a strong, healthy, and diverse team through strategic hiring, mentoring, and coaching

About the team
The AWS Credentials Distribution Systems (CreDS) team sits within AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) - the backbone of cloud security at Amazon. We own tier-0 services that distribute and manage ephemeral, least-privilege credentials across AWS compute platforms and Amazon's internal infrastructure.

Strong ownership and operational excellence are essential to succeed in this role. We hold a high bar for system reliability, security, and scalability — backed by rigorous operational practices, thorough code reviews, and a bias toward automation. When an issue arises, we own it, learn from it, and build mechanisms to prevent it from recurring.

Basic Qualifications

- 3+ years of engineering team management experience
- 7+ years of working directly within engineering teams experience
- 3+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services experience
- Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and livesite operations
- Experience partnering with product or program management teams

Preferred Qualifications

- 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 recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers

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 - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually