Principal UX Designer, AWS Search, Security, Observability, & Governance

Amazon; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

RSUs

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Amazon is seeking a Principal UX Designer to own the end-to-end design strategy for OpenSearch, spanning search, observability, and agentic AI experiences used by hundreds of thousands of customers.

You will partner with the GM and senior leaders to shape how enterprises discover, adopt, and expand OpenSearch across console, IDE, MCP, and CLI surfaces, while leading a high-impact design organization.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of professional experience in UX/Product Design, with at least 4 years at Staff/Principal level at a top technology company.
• Demonstrable portfolio of shipped enterprise-scale B2B products with data-intensive interfaces.
• Deep expertise in design systems with governance and cross-team adoption.
• Strong technical fluency: ability to read, review, and contribute to production code (HTML/CSS/JS, React/TypeScript).
• Experience designing for complex data visualization such as dashboards or monitoring systems.
• Track record of influencing product strategy at the organizational level, not just features.
• Experience leading or mentoring a team of senior designers.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term UX vision and roadmap for OpenSearch products across multiple surfaces.
• Architect and govern agentic design patterns across the portfolio.
• Lead agent-guided onboarding experiences enabling migrations from Splunk, Elasticsearch, and Solr.
• Own multi-surface experience strategy across IDE, MCP, CLI, and web.
• Drive design-as-code practices by prototyping and contributing production code.
• Scale team impact via the OUI design system and tooling.
• Establish UX quality benchmarks and lead critique sessions globally.
• Mentor and develop a team of senior designers.

Skills

UX design leadership

Enterprise UX

Design systems

Frontend code literacy

Mentoring

Tools

HTML/CSS/JS

React/TypeScript

DesignBrain

Job description

Job ID: 10474505 | Amazon Development Center U.S., Inc.

We are looking for a Principal UX Designer to define and own the end-to-end design strategy for Amazon OpenSearch, spanning search, observability, and agentic AI experiences used by hundreds of thousands of customers. This is a high-impact IC role with significant organizational influence. You will partner directly with the GM and senior engineering leaders to shape how enterprises discover, adopt, and expand OpenSearch across console, IDE, MCP, and CLI surfaces. The ideal candidate combines elite interaction design craft with deep technical fluency, operates as an architect of systemic solutions rather than a feature designer, and has a track record of shipping agentic and data-intensive experiences that scale across complex B2B enterprise environments.

Key job responsibilities

1. Define the long-term UX vision and roadmap for OpenSearch products (Search, Observability, Serverless, AI/ML) in partnership with the GM and senior engineering leadership.
2. Architect and govern agentic design patterns across the OpenSearch portfolio — progressive autonomy models, approval gates, confidence signals, reasoning displays, and human-in-the-loop workflows for AI-driven operations.
3. Lead the design of agent-guided onboarding experiences that collapse setup from weeks to minutes, directly enabling customer acquisition from Splunk, Elasticsearch, and Solr migrations.
4. Own the multi-surface experience strategy: ship design across IDE, MCP, CLI, and web so that OpenSearch meets builders at the point of application creation without context-switching.
5. Drive "design-as-code" practices: build production-quality prototypes and commit directly to production codebases (React, TypeScript, OUI) to collapse design-engineering feedback loops.
6. Scale team impact through the OUI design system and DesignBrain tooling — ensuring patterns solved once (streaming, reasoning display, approval gates) are immediately available across all projects.
7. Establish UX quality benchmarks and lead critique sessions, elevating craft standards globally across the team.
8. Mentor and develop a team of senior designers, providing technical guidance and career development.
9. Represent Design in executive reviews with data-driven recommendations and clear strategic narratives that connect design decisions to business outcomes ($400M+ growth portfolio).
10. Run structured research cycles (trust calibration studies, competitive signal capture, customer interviews) that feed directly into the product roadmap as sequenced product plays, not reports.

A day in the life

Your morning starts with a competitive signal, a new entrant shipped a diff‑then‑approve model that you're framing into a design implication for the team's weekly brief. By mid‑morning you're in a working session with an engineer, pressure‑testing the interaction model for an agent‑guided migration experience that helps Splunk customers move configurations, visualizations, and alerts to OpenSearch in minutes. You're not waiting for a PM to write the brief. You're shaping the problem definition.

After lunch, you're pairing on the OUI component library, refining an approval‑gate pattern that will be reused across Olly (the AI investigation agent), the Relevance Agent, and MCP Apps. You're committing directly to the codebase — this team ships in production, not in Figma. Later, it's a strategy session with the GM, where you're advocating for design investment in onboarding flows based on data showing that guided agent experiences drove 63% net‑new customer acquisition on Serverless.

At this level, your output isn't screens, it's the design intelligence that sharpens how the entire team operates. You're setting the bar for craft, bringing structure to ambiguous problem spaces, and making the case for design at the product definition layer, not after it.

About the team

The OpenSearch design team [part of SSOG] shapes the experience of one of AWS's fastest‑growing products, spanning search, observability, vector databases, and next‑generation agentic surfaces. We cover a portfolio that includes OpenSearch Service, Serverless, AI agents (Olly, Relevance Agent, Agent Skills), and MCP Apps. Our work spans the AWS Console, standalone web UIs, IDE integrations, and CLI, wherever builders work.

We operate as an AI‑native builder team. Every designer works directly alongside engineering in shared builder pods, using tools like DesignBrain (our multi‑agent design intelligence system) to accelerate research synthesis, user flow generation, and UX quality review. We don't hand off specs and wait. We prototype, commit production code (178+ commits, 44+ merged to mainline), run experiments, and push toward production. In H1 2026, six designers produced seven major launches in six months, including experiences adopted by Nintendo, Dow Jones, and 200+ enterprise customers.

The problems we're solving are genuinely hard: how do you design trust into AI agents that tune search relevance or triage production incidents autonomously? How do you make agentic reasoning legible to both search engineers and SREs? How do you collapse onboarding from weeks to minutes for enterprises migrating 7,500+ Solr customers or $50M Splunk deployments? If that's the kind of challenge that pulls you in, you'll find your people here.

Basic Qualifications

1. 12+ years of professional experience in UX/Product Design, with at least 4 years at Staff/Principal level (or equivalent) at a top‑tier technology company.
2. Demonstrable portfolio of shipped enterprise‑scale B2B products, with emphasis on data‑intensive interfaces (search, analytics, observability, or developer tools).
3. Deep expertise in design systems — architecture, governance, component libraries, and cross‑team adoption at scale.
4. Strong technical fluency: ability to read, review, and contribute to production code (HTML/CSS/JS, React/TypeScript preferred).
5. Experience designing for complex data visualization — dashboards, query interfaces, log analysis, or monitoring systems.
6. Track record of influencing product strategy at the organizational level, not just feature‑level execution.
7. Experience leading or mentoring a team of senior designers.

Preferred Qualifications

1. Direct experience in search platforms, observability/APM, or cloud infrastructure products.
2. Hands‑on experience with AI/ML product design, particularly agentic patterns (autonomous agents, human‑in‑the‑loop workflows, progressive autonomy).
3. Experience building from 0→1 and establishing product‑market fit for new product lines.
4. Experience designing multi‑surface experiences (console, IDE extensions, CLI, MCP/API‑driven interfaces).
5. Proficiency with AI‑assisted design and development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Kiro, v0).
6. Experience with open‑source communities and developer ecosystem design.
7. Published thought leadership or recognized contributions to the design community.
8. Experience with migration/onboarding experience design at enterprise scale.

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

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.