Hi, I'm Aaron Brier
Software Development Engineer II @ Amazon
Experienced software engineer specializing in AWS services, distributed systems, and operational excellence. Passionate about solving complex technical challenges and mentoring the next generation of developers.
About Me
I'm a Software Development Engineer II at Amazon with over 3 years of experience building scalable, distributed systems. I specialize in developing critical AWS services that operate at massive scale, focusing on reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
My expertise spans the full software development lifecycle - from customer research and system design to implementation, testing, deployment, and operations. I'm particularly passionate about operational excellence, having significantly improved service reliability and reduced operational overhead through innovative solutions.
Technical Skills
Professional Experience
Software Development Engineer II
Amazon Web Services
April 2025 - Present
Currently working on IDR (Incident Detection and Response), focusing on automated incident detection, investigation, and response capabilities for AWS customers.
Software Development Engineer I
Amazon Web Services
August 2022 - April 2025
- Service Regionalization: Led the complete regionalization of a critical service, designing and implementing global table replication across all commercial regions and resolving complex architectural challenges
- Customer Account Migration: Pioneered the migration of team services away from customer accounts to centralized systems, eliminating 550+ operational issues and significantly improving security posture
- Security Incident Response: Delivered Security Incident Response capabilities while on away-team assignment, coordinating across multiple teams under strict deadlines
- Operational Excellence: Created comprehensive operational dashboards adopted team-wide, authored critical COEs, and consistently assisted in debugging high-severity issues
- Mentorship: Successfully mentored intern through complex AWS project, resulting in 99.5% reduction in Lambda invocations and 75% cost reduction
Software Development Engineer Intern
Amazon Web Services
Summer 2022
- Internal Service Development: Designed and developed an internal service that generates operational work items for non-compliant AWS resources in customer accounts
- Proactive Issue Management: Facilitated proactive issue identification and remediation for hundreds of customer accounts within AWS Managed Services
- Operational Efficiency: Enabled ops engineers to efficiently address non-compliance by providing insights and access to manual or automated remediation options
- Impact: Project success led to full-time offer and subsequent team placement
Lab Tutor
UC Irvine - Donald Bren School of ICS
January 2020 - March 2020
Provided academic support to undergraduate students in computer science coursework.
Key Projects & Achievements
Service Regionalization
Architected and implemented complete regionalization of a critical service, solving complex distributed systems challenges and enabling global service availability.
Customer Account Migration
Led innovative solution to eliminate team's footprint in customer accounts, reducing operational overhead and improving security across all AWS Managed Services.
Operational Dashboards
Created comprehensive monitoring and alerting dashboards adopted across the team, significantly improving operational visibility and incident response.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
September 2018 - June 2022
GPA: 3.97/4.0