Werner Vogels posted a description for a research engineer reporting directly to him, the CTO of Amazon.com. Reading thru the description is pretty much a roadmap of the skills necessary for building distributed systems on that scale.
Amazon.com's website is the most well-known front end to one of the world's largest and busiest service-oriented architectures. Its systems requirements are very challenging: maintain high-availability and guaranteed performance in an ultra-scalable fashion while being very cost efficient. From webpage rendering to order pipeline workflow, from data-warehouse to distributed caching, all require unique solutions. Many of these solutions require significant innovation: often these challenges have not even been addressed in research in a production setting at the scale of Amazon.Posted by Josh at July 29, 2007 03:26 PM