Kernel/Hypervisor Engineer, Kernel and Operating System (KaOS)

In 2018 EC2 expanded its operations to Cambridge by introducing a new Kernel and Operating System (KaOS) team in this location, in addition to our offices in Dresden, Germany.
The KaOS team develops and maintains the hypervisors present in all EC2 servers, as well as various other low-level components, with particular focus on security, availability and performance; with continued research investment in self-healing, live updates, scheduling, networking, block devices, and much, much more.
Some of our recent innovations include the Nitro Hypervisor, core of the Nitro System, and the Firecracker MicroVM. More information about the Nitro system is available at:
* AWS Nitro System blog post by James Hamilton:
* James Hamilton's blog on Xen-on-Nitro:
* AWS re:Invent 2018: Powering Next-Gen EC2 Instances: Deep Dive into the Nitro System (CMP303-R1):
More information about the Firecracker MicroVM:
* AWS Blog post by Je Barr:
* Firecracker GitHub landing page:
Key job responsibilities
The Cambridge KaOS/EC2 team has a wide charter, with focus on Hypervisors both Xen and KVM. Position
Amazon is looking for an experienced Software Development Engineer with experience in Kernel or Hypervisor for one of our Kernel and Operating System teams. As part of the team, you will be given the chance to have a signicant impact on our systems, our business and most importantly our customers.
If you are passionate about Hypervisors, and want to build solutions to complex problems that directly aect millions of people: there may be no better place than Amazon for you to impact the world!
You will be building the lowest layer of the Amazon Web Services software stack, engineering EC2 instance families and inuencing the EC2 Nitro Hypervisor for AWS. You will be working on key areas of the Linux Kernel such as: Hypervisor, Block I/O, Networking, PV Driver, IOMMU while having the opportunity to innovate, make new engineering proposals, and explore new areas.
A day in the life
* Work with your manager and other engineers in delivering to the roadmap.
* Focus on high quality delivery and operational excellence.
* Solve technical challenges impacting our customers.
We are open to hiring candidates to work out of one of the following locations:
Cambridge, GBR
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience in professional, non-internship software development
- Experience contributing to the architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and current systems
- Experience programming with at least one modern language such as Java, C++, or C# including object-oriented design
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- 3+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Experience in at least one CPU architecture such as x86 or ARM
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