Senior Software Development Engineer - AWS OpenSearch Service

Description

Imagine running search and analytics at any scale without thinking about clusters, capacity, or version upgrades. Where your queries return in milliseconds whether you're indexing a thousand documents or a hundred billion. Where the platform scales, heals, and secures itself so your team can focus on the questions, not the infrastructure.

That's what we build at Amazon OpenSearch.

Amazon OpenSearch is the fully managed and Serverless AWS service that lets customers deploy, operate, and scale OpenSearch for log analytics, full-text search, application monitoring, observability, and AI-powered retrieval. We serve hundreds of thousands of customers running mission-critical workloads across every AWS region, and we are part of the AWS Database and Analytics organization.

Come join the OpenSearch Control Plane team. We are responsible for a service that:

- Reliably manages a large fleet of cloud-native OpenSearch clusters and collections, freeing customers from sizing, scaling, and patching decisions
- Guarantees high availability and durability for mission-critical search and observability workloads at the scale of the most demanding internet businesses
- Orchestrates and automates the complete lifecycle of an OpenSearch cluster or collection — from creation through scale-up, scale-out, upgrade, replication, and fail-over

The OpenSearch control plane is not just any distributed system. It orchestrates a fleet of clusters across every AWS region, detects and recovers from node failures in seconds, and serves workloads that span petabytes of customer data. Most recently, we launched **OpenSearch Serverless NextGen** — delivering ultra-fast collection provisioning and true scale-to-zero capacity, so customers pay only for what they use and get a working environment in seconds rather than minutes. We are not done; this is one of many investments raising the bar for what customers can expect from a managed search service.

OpenSearch itself is a community-driven, Apache 2.0–licensed open-source search and analytics suite built on Apache Lucene. Since launching in July 2021, the project has delivered multiple major and minor releases advancing core search, vector search, and analytics. Our next phase focuses on transforming OpenSearch into an intelligent retrieval engine — one that meets the evolving needs of customers running search, analytics, and AI-powered workloads across structured, unstructured, and multi-modal data.

We work in Java, Rust, Python, and Go. We contribute upstream to OpenSearch and Apache Lucene. We are customer-obsessed, operate with the entrepreneurial pace of a startup inside one of the world's largest cloud providers, and value strong intuition backed by metrics.

**Operations is core engineering on this team, not overhead.** Engineers operate what they build, and we treat customer-impacting incidents with the same engineering rigor we apply to feature work. Reliability and Static Stability is a forcing function for design, not a phase after launch.

Key job responsibilities
- Drive architectural decisions in a large-scale distributed system — multi-region orchestration workflows, multi-tenant control surfaces, lifecycle automation, scale-to-zero, regional failure isolation, and graceful degradation under partial outage
- Invent and Simplify in equal measure — drive simplification of legacy designs as actively as you propose new ones; identify and eliminate accidental complexity across the team's surfaces; mentor others on simplifying-by-design
- Treat operations as core engineering — own the systems you build end-to-end, lead incident response and RCAs with customer-first urgency, and drive operational improvements that compound across the team
- Lead design and development of complex services across cluster management, capacity orchestration, scaling policies, query routing, security, and machine learning
- Build and apply AI fluency across the software development lifecycle — decompose problems for AI assistance, ground prompts in relevant context, validate AI-generated output, and use AI to accelerate both code and beyond-code work
- Mentor and grow engineers across the team; raise the bar for software development, operational excellence, and security
- Set technical direction and partner with the broader OpenSearch organization to align solutions with customer needs and market opportunities
- Contribute upstream to OpenSearch and Apache Lucene

About the team
AWS values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.  

Why AWS? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. We pioneered cloud computing and never stopped innovating — that’s why customers from the most successful startups to Global 500 companies trust our robust suite of products and services to power their businesses.  

Inclusive Team Culture Here at AWS, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon  conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness.  

Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.  

Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud.

Basic Qualifications

- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team

Preferred Qualifications

- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.