Principal UX Designer, AWS Search, Security, Observability Governance

Position: Principal UX Designer, AWS Search, Security, Observability, & Governance
Description

We are looking for a Principal UX Designer to define and own the end-to-end design strategy for Amazon Open Search, 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 Open Search 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 Open Search products (Search, Observability, Serverless, AI/ML) in partnership with the GM and senior engineering leadership.

2.  Architect and govern agentic design patterns across the Open Search 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 Open Search 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, Type Script, OUI) to collapse design-engineering feedback loops.

6.  Scale team impact through the OUI design system and Design Brain 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 Open Search 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 Open Search 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 Open Search Service, Serverless, AI agents (Olly, Relevance Agent,…