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A Day in the Life of an AWS Developer Support Engineer

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We are looking for some additional Developer Support Engineers to join our Seattle-based team.

I sat down with a couple of the team members to learn more about what they doing during a typical day. Here’s a rough time line that we put together for someone working the day shift:

Get to the office and grab a cup of coffee (and maybe a donut too), check out the view of Mount Rainier from my window, and say hello to Mocha (a co-workers dog).

Sync up with the overnight crew to take over a high-priority support case: a customer is getting big (fast) and were keeping an eye on things to make sure they have everything that they need.

A new customer has questions about getting started with Amazon EC2, so I walk him through some of the basics, highlight a number of best practices, and then let him loose to launch his first instance.

I’ve got a few minutes so I log into one my test instances and update a script that posts some diagnostic data to an SQS queue.

There is an update to a support case that includes a tcpdump of a failed request to one of our APIs. Turns out the customers firewall was stripping some headers that we were expecting.

An email just arrived from a customer that we talked with last month. They have a few more questions, this time related to scaling their site. Taking into account what we already know about their setup, we provide them with guidance on how they can use some of the features of Amazon EC2 (Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Monitoring).

The sandwich I brought for lunch isnt cutting it so a trip to the cafeteria is due. I’m planning to sit in on a talk at lunch by a principal engineer for one of our services. He is covering some of the implementation details about the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud service.

Back at my desk to help a customer migrate his Amazon EC2 instances and EBS volumes from the Northern Virginia region to the new Northern California region.

Another new customer just opened a support case and wants to know how to use the new CloudFront streaming feature, so I walk her through setting up a distribution and streaming content from her site.

The next shift is starting to show up now and there is a training session for a new service that is launching next month. These are great opportunities to pick the brains of the guys who build these services.

If you can handle a day (or a night) like this, check out the job description and apply today!

— Jeff;

Modified 08/10/2020 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.
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Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.