Principal Solutions Developer , Prototyping and Customer Engineering (PACE)

Job Summary
Do you have a builder's mentality where "show me" means more than "tell me"? Are you passionate about technology and AI, understand cloud architectures and platforms, and quick to adopt emerging technologies? Are you adept at working with customers to experiment with innovative approaches and validate technical feasibility?
As trusted customer advocates, the Prototyping and Customer Engineering (PACE) team helps customers create early iterations of products and solutions, often exploring new technical grounds. We're seeking experienced technologists who possess a unique balance of technical depth, business acumen, and strong interpersonal skills.

Role Overview
As a Principal Solutions Developer, you will partner with customers and AWS account and service teams to craft highly scalable, flexible, and resilient solutions that address customer business problems and accelerate AWS adoption. You'll shape and build prototypes across domains including Machine Learning, Agentic Design, Serverless Architecture, and multi-modal Generative AI—with most projects exploring the art of the possible using the latest methods, frameworks, services, and models.
You'll work across industry verticals including automotive, energy, healthcare, telecommunications, manufacturing, and media and entertainment. The ability to connect technology with measurable business value is critical—you will help drive revenue growth and strategic outcomes for customers, influencing adoption decisions and accelerating customer success with AWS.


Key job responsibilities
Leadership Profile: You're expected to be both "coach" and "player", essentially a CTO-like profile. You must be hands-on with deep experience and knowledge, articulate in communication, and capable of mentoring team members. You'll represent AWS in customer meetings, serving as both the AWS voice and customer advocate.

At the Principal level, you will operate with complete independence in ambiguous environments where business objectives are emergent and problems are novel. You will decompose significantly complex challenges into elegant solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes, with your work influencing entire organizations and establishing patterns that become reference architectures and reusable solutions.

Technical Excellence: As a technical leader, you combine design and architecture knowledge with development capability, comfortable at both the whiteboard and keyboard. You'll push the technical bar by taking initiative to learn new topics and experiment across domains such as AI, serverless, Agentic Design, and Physical AI in enterprise contexts.

Ownership and Execution: You'll own key development tasks from design through implementation with minimal supervision, delivering to a high standard. You'll establish trust by defining clear paths forward and actively reviewing others' proposals, speaking up when architectural choices need improvement. This role demands exceptional judgment, the ability to think big while diving deep, and a relentless focus on raising the bar for technical excellence.

Scale and Impact: You'll improve your scale and impact across the team and organization with a technical focus. You will look across the team's technical body of work to identify ways to invent and simplify, defining experiments and projects that you and others in the team can execute on. This includes working to optimize developer-related processes and identify improvement opportunities that benefit the broader organization. Thought leadership in AI-assisted coding methods and tools is essential. You lead by example and continuously seek better ways to apply emerging technology to code development.

A day in the life
You'll review technical designs for upcoming prototypes to identify improvement opportunities and emerging trends where the team can invest and simplify solutions. Working collaboratively with team members, specialists, and service teams, you'll propose better approaches to solve customer technical challenges and advocate for these solutions through discussions and written narratives.

During customer prototype engagements, you'll collaborate with developers, program managers, and specialists to deliver results—serving as project lead on some engagements and contributing part-time on others. Project teams vary based on availability, specialized skills required, and career growth interests. Team members span the US and EMEA, with periodic larger meetings to share knowledge and align on goals.

You'll also dedicate time to pursue thought leadership initiatives that align with both team objectives and your professional interests.

About the team
Our team comprises mostly experienced full-stack developers passionate about delivering technical solutions using AWS services in a rapid development environment. We move quickly and support ea