Software Development Engineer, AWS OpenSearch Service

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) matching

Paid time off

Job summary

Amazon is seeking a Software Development Engineer for the AWS OpenSearch Service in Austin, Texas. The role involves designing and developing components of a large-scale distributed control plane and requires a passion for software development and operational excellence.

Qualified candidates will possess significant experience in software development, including proficiency in Java, Rust, or Python, and a degree in a related field. This position offers a competitive salary within the range of $143,700 to $194,400 annually plus comprehensive benefits.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience.
• 2+ years of design or architecture of new and existing systems.
• Experience designing and developing large-scale distributed software applications.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and operate components of a large-scale distributed control plane.
• Participate fully in incident response and operational improvements.
• Write robust, efficient, maintainable code in Java, Rust, Python, or Go.

Skills

Software development experience

Object Oriented Design

Java

Rust

Python

Education

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

Tools

C#

C++

Perl

Job description

Software Development Engineer, AWS OpenSearch Service

Job ID: 10462677 | Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Imagine running search and analytics at any scale without thinking about clusters, capacity, or version upgrades. Your queries return in milliseconds whether you're indexing a thousand documents or a hundred billion. 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 a 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, which is responsible for:

• Reliably managing a large fleet of cloud‑native OpenSearch clusters and collections, freeing customers from sizing, scaling, and patching decisions.
• Guaranteeing high availability and durability for mission‑critical search and observability workloads at the scale of the most demanding internet businesses.
• Orchestrating and automating 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. 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 that meets the evolving needs of customers running search, analytics, and AI‑powered workloads across structured, unstructured, and multimodal 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.
• Own systems 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.
• Continuously 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.
• 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.
• 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 experience, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent.

EEO & Inclusion

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.

Compensation and Benefits

The base salary range for this position is USD 143,700.00 – 194,400.00 annually. 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 optional 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.