Understanding the Systems Dev Engineer Role

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the TPM role at Amazon. Just like the TPM job family, there is another job family that I feel is often underrated and confused. And that’s the Systems Development Engineer (SysDE) role at Amazon. In my current role at AWS, I had the unique opportunity to build a team of engineers across multiple job families and organize these engineers in key domains centered around Customer Success Engineering.

In this post, I wanted to share my experience building an Engineering team that focuses on delivering scalable tooling and automation. Like many other hiring managers, when I went into the hiring process I was torn between the needs of my team needing a Systems Engineer (SE), Systems Development Engineer (Sys DE), and Software Development Engineer (SDE). While I have worked with all these job families in both present and past roles, I also didn't want my biases to influence me. But when I started wrapping my head around what the prime vision for the team is centered around, I was convinced that the team would benefit in hiring engineers that are SysDE’s over SDE’s or SE’s.

Here are the 5-key traits I see in the SysDE’s that truly makes them unique amongst other job families.

• Technology generalists - A technology generalist is someone that brings in a wide-array of domain expertise. They are not expected to have a deep understanding of each of these domains but what matters here is in their ability to be successful and serve as a generalist more from the breadth of their expertise.
• Enabling builders in the community - SysDE’s focus on automation and operations through the lens of continuous improvements. If you are a team whose primary responsibilities are centered around continuous process improvements, then you would achieve the maximum efficiency gains through investment in tooling and automation. Not only these investments in tooling and automation benefit your own direct team but it has the potential to enable other builders in the community.
• Building systems to scale - SysDE’s can operate as the gate-keepers of operational excellence and best practices. Their ability to operate as technology generalists helps them build distributed systems that are tested, maintainable, resilient, and repeatable.
• Can write software - SysDE’ s are SDE minded generalists that can write code and deliver software. The key differentiator is their focus on writing code is centered more around their ability to deliver logical code that is focused around tooling, automation and operational improvements.
• Great at troubleshooting - SysDE’ s are a rare breed of engineers that can interact with low-level aspects of a system. With their generalist mindset, they can dive-deep into a problem, put their coding mindset to effective use and troubleshoot a problem at play. They produce repeatable procedures that enable other builders to effectively do the same type of troubleshooting in the future.

So if you are contemplating what role you need to hire for then don't bias your mindset to a specific job family. Start with the why you need one job function over another. Lastly, if you are an engineer in the job market that possesses one or more of the above key qualities, then the SysDE role is for you!

Please feel free to drop any questions or comments. I'd be delighted to address them.