Bret Ambrose
Senior Software Development Engineer at Amazon
Redmond, Washington, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBret Ambrose is a Senior Software Development Engineer based in Redmond with 11 years of focused experience building and hardening backend systems at Amazon and other studios. He brings deep cross-language expertise in C, C++, Java, and Python, demonstrated by contributions to widely used AWS SDKs and IoT device SDKs where he improved security (session credentials), platform portability, and CI reliability. His work spans core library fixes, build and test infrastructure, and pragmatic API and dependency updates—signals of an engineer who balances low-level correctness with developer experience. Before Amazon he shipped game-engine and systems code at studios including Zenimax and Petroglyph, giving him a strong background in performance-sensitive, long-lived codebases. Collected contributions to high-profile open-source AWS projects show he’s comfortable making changes that matter to large ecosystems while keeping code maintainable.
12 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Mathematics/Computer Science, BS, Mathematics/Computer Science at Pomona College
Stackoverflow
161reputation
4kreached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (43)
unit-testing10
dependency-management10
c-language10
pytest10
python10
mqtt10
cmake10
c1110
java10
mqttnet10
aws-sdk10
c1710
javas10
iot10
aws10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
awslabs/aws-c-common
Feb 2019 - Jan 2023
Core c99 package for AWS SDK for C. Includes cross-platform primitives, configuration, data structures, and error handling.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 releases, 116 reviews, 90 commits in 3 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Bret primarily contributed to the core C99 library for the AWS SDK for C. Their work focused on improving the functionality and reliability of the library, including fixes for overflow checks in array lists, implementation of environment functions across platforms, and the addition of byte buffer utility functions. Additionally, the user enhanced byte cursor functionality, adding predicate-based trimming capabilities.
aws-sdkc99data-structuredata-structureserror-handling
aws/aws-iot-device-sdk-python-v2
Sep 2019 - Oct 2022
Next generation AWS IoT Client SDK for Python using the AWS Common Runtime
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:34 releases, 44 reviews, 19 commits in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Bret primarily contributed to the AWS IoT Device SDK for Python v2, focusing on updating dependencies and core functionality. Their work included bumping library versions, such as `awscrt`, fixing bugs, and adding or modifying core APIs in the `awsiot` module. They also added features for Greengrass, and worked on updating samples to include improved proxy support and more generally improving the codebase. Several commits involved updates to dependencies to pull in bug fixes and security patches.
awsaws-iotpython
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