What does a KMS SDE do?

KMS is an unique cloud service because it is first and foremost a security service that offers general purpose cryptography primitives: encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify etc., so security, security and security are always our number 1, number 2 and number 3 tenets in all our reasoning process. Customers of KMS need absolute assurance on key durability, because losing a key is equivalent to losing data encrypted directly and indirectly by the key. But KMS is also an extremely large distributed computing system that handles millions and millions of requests every second, availability, latency and scalability are critical to our customers. A KMS SDE needs to perform 4 roles in their daily endeavor to keep this tier-0 service running smoothly: 1. A part time security engineer role. Everyone in KMS needs to be trained in security engineering, regardless of their job title. Our SDEs do risk analysis, thread model in every project. 2. A part time Technical Project Manager role. We train all our engineers to manage their projects end to end, from requirement gathering, design review, to set up project plan, communicate milestone and date, and to send out weekly project status update, drive operation readiness review. 3. A part time Product Manager. Our engineers are asked to write their own Press Release - Frequently Asked Questions (PR/FAQ) document. More than 60% of our projects are driven from engineering side to work on security, durability, availability, performance, scalability or operation excellence. We believe it is essential every engineer can think on behalf of customers and stakeholders and work backwards. We don’t just rely on official Product Manager to tell us what to do, every engineer is the owner of end user experience and customer value. 4. A full time software development engineer. Cryptography, distributed computing, big data engineering, in KMS, our SDEs work on bleeding edge technologies to solve hard problems. That is quite a lot of roles for a SDE. Is it too much? Maybe … but I would argue that every role is essential for anyone who aspires to become a “good” engineer. We will never be 100%, but we are always learning and growing. Do you want to be one of us?