Software Development Engineer Intern
Amazon Web Services · AWS Shield · Seattle, Washington
Sept 2026 – Present
Internship
Working on AWS Shield, which runs on a global fleet of hosts across data centres and edge sites. My project is the automation that finds hosts quietly broken by hardware failure, decides whether the fleet can afford to lose them, and gets them repaired and returned to service without a human driving each step.
- Built automated detection for degraded hosts by correlating hardware telemetry with internal service metrics, so a hardware failure surfaces on its own instead of waiting for a ticket or an incident to reveal it.
- Added a safety analysis in front of every removal — a host only comes out of service once the remaining fleet can absorb its traffic, so mitigating one failure never cascades into an overload of its neighbours.
- Closed the loop end to end — the system raises the ticket to data centre operations, tracks the repair, and returns the host to service once the fault is resolved, turning a manual reactive process into an automated one.
What it taught me
The hard part was never the detection. It was deciding what is safe to remove — a failing host you pull at the wrong moment hands its load to the hosts next to it, and a fix that overloads the fleet is worse than the failure it was cleaning up. Automation only earns trust once it knows when not to act.