Software Development Engineer, AWS OpenSearch Service

Amazon Web Services (AWS); Austin (TX); On-site; USD 143,700 - 194,400; Full time

Job summary

Amazon Web Services, Inc. in Austin, TX is hiring for a software engineer to design, develop, and operate a large-scale distributed control plane for OpenSearch.

You will tackle capacity provisioning, lifecycle workflows, and multi-tenant infrastructure while collaborating with senior engineers across Java, Rust, Python, and Go. The role emphasizes ownership of end-to-end systems, incident response, and cost-effective maintenance in a serverless/large-cluster environment with a focus on

Qualifications

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.
• 2+ years of design or architecture experience for large-scale systems.
• 1+ year of software development engineer or related experience.
• Experience with OO design and multiple programming languages.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and operate components of a large-scale distributed control plane.
• Look for opportunities to simplify—reduce configuration sprawl and complexity.
• Own the systems you build end-to-end and participate in incident response and RCAs.
• Solve problems in cluster orchestration, capacity provisioning, and lifecycle workflows.
• Write robust, maintainable code in Java, Rust, Python, or Go.

Skills

Software development

Distributed systems

Java

C++

Python

Go

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics or related field

Tools

Java

Rust

Python

Go

C++

C#

Perl

Job 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. Amazon OpenSearch Service 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

• Design, develop, and operate components of a large-scale distributed control plane — reason about failure modes, multi-tenant isolation, and blast-radius before writing code
• Look for opportunities to simplify — consolidate duplicate abstractions, remove dead code, reduce configuration sprawl, and challenge complexity that doesn't earn its keep
• Treat operations as core engineering — own the systems you build end-to-end, participate fully in incident response and RCAs, and drive operational improvements that reduce cost and maintenance burden
• Solve real problems in cluster orchestration, capacity provisioning, lifecycle workflows, multi-tenant infrastructure, query routing, and operational tooling
• Use AI coding assistants and GenAI tools effectively across the software development lifecycle — from design and prototyping through coding, testing, code review, debugging, and operations — applying engineering judgment to validate AI-generated output against Amazon's correctness, security, and operational bar
• Write robust, efficient, and maintainable code in Java, Rust, Python, or Go
• Partner with senior engineers to translate ambiguous requirements into concrete deliverables; prototype, test, and validate
• Continually challenge what exists and explore what should change to better serve customers

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
• 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
• 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
• 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
• Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
• Experience programming with at least one software programming language

Preferred Qualifications

• 3+ 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&DD 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.

USA, TX, Austin - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually

Company

Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Job ID: A10462677