Software Development Engineer, AWS OpenSearch Service

Software Development Engineer, AWS Open Search Service

Job :  | 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 Open Search Service is a fully managed and Serverless AWS service that lets customers deploy, operate, and scale Open Search 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 Open Search Control Plane team, which is responsible for:

• Reliably managing a large fleet of cloud‑native Open Search 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 Open Search cluster or collection—from creation through scale‑up, scale‑out, upgrade, replication, and fail‑over.

The Open Search 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 Open Search Serverless Next Gen
—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.

Open Search 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 Open Search 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 Open Search 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.

• 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…