Kevin Dzierwinski

Software Engineer with 11+ years at Amazon Web Services, designing and owning large-scale, safety-critical infrastructure systems that operate at global scale. My work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, physical and optical networking, and security, with a strong focus on reducing complexity and operational risk through architecture. I was the long-term technical owner and lead engineer for a globally distributed platform responsible for validating the health of AWS’s physical network backbone, spanning multiple switch platforms and internally designed Linux-based routers. The system tested 30k–65k links per day and touched ~25 petabits per second of network capacity daily, evolving continuously to support new hardware generations, higher link speeds, and proprietary network protocols. To address scaling and coordination limits, I designed new device-local testing architectures and a custom Layer-2 protocol integrated into AWS’s proprietary network OS. This shifted orchestration responsibility from centralized control planes onto the devices themselves, enabling peer discovery, state negotiation, and synchronized execution without Layer-3 configuration, significantly reducing distributed state complexity and failure modes. I also worked in AWS Network Security, where I designed and built a fleet-scale distributed system to audit and rotate credentials across 1M+ network devices worldwide. The system supported periodic compliance auditing as well as safe, rolling global rotation events with explicit blast-radius controls. I’m a named inventor on four U.S. patents related to network testing and infrastructure automation. I’m most interested in problems involving large-scale systems, carrier-grade and optical networking, protocol design, and long-lived infrastructure that must evolve safely over time.