Sr. Software Development Manager, AWS OpenSearch Service

Search and analytics infrastructure is at an inflection point. Customers don't want to operate clusters anymore — they want to create a collection, point their data at it, get back sub-second query results, and trust that capacity, scaling, version upgrades, replica balancing, regional fail-over, storage cost, and live-site health are someone else's problem. They want **a service they call, not a database they operate**.

That's what we're building.

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 lead a core engineering organization inside Amazon OpenSearch. We build the platform end-to-end — the orchestration, lifecycle, and multi-tenant control surfaces that make OpenSearch feel managed, and the query-serving, indexing, and storage engine that makes it feel fast. In practice this means:

- Every API customers call to create, configure, scale, upgrade, or recover their search infrastructure — plus the multi-region orchestration workflows behind those APIs
- Query serving, indexing throughput, vector and kNN retrieval, Lucene/JVM tuning, and the sharded storage layer that customers feel in query latency and cost per terabyte scanned
- Multi-tenant isolation, blast-radius containment, and the operational discipline required to run this at AWS scale, across every AWS commercial and GovCloud region

You'll own a multi-team engineering organization inside that charter, along with a multi-year roadmap that advances OpenSearch across all of those fronts.

Our platform:

- 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
- Serves search, analytics, and AI-powered retrieval workloads across petabytes of customer data, at query latencies and ingestion throughput that raise the bar every quarter
- 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 platform is not just any distributed system. It orchestrates a fleet of clusters across every AWS region and recovers from node failures in seconds; it serves workloads that span petabytes of customer data and hundreds of millions of documents. Most recently, we launched **OpenSearch Serverless NextGen** — delivering ultra-fast collection provisioning and true scale-to-zero capacity. We are not done; this is one of many investments raising the bar across the whole platform.

### What you'll lead

- **A multi-team engineering organization** inside OpenSearch, responsible for the platform capabilities customers depend on to run search and analytics at scale
- **A multi-year technical strategy** that advances OpenSearch on the fronts customers feel most — provisioning speed, lifecycle automation, query latency, indexing throughput, and the path toward AI-powered retrieval and unified multi-tenant service delivery
- **The operational health** of a service that runs in every AWS commercial and GovCloud region, with customer-impacting incidents getting the same engineering rigor as feature work
- **A team of SDMs and senior ICs** — you hire, grow, and (when needed) reshape the org. Your most lasting contribution is the next generation of OpenSearch leaders

**We don't need you to be an expert in search, retrieval, or OpenSearch internals.** We value curiosity, craftsmanship, customer obsession, and a track record of leading engineering organizations that ship cloud-scale distributed systems. The OpenSearch domain is something you'll learn on the job, alongside everyone else who joins us.

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, Go, and C/C++. 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. Site reliability is a forcing function for design, not a phase after launch.

Key job responsibilities
As a Senior Engineering Manager on the OpenSearch team, you will:

- **Set multi-year technical strategy** for your organization within OpenSearch — advancing customer-facing performance, operational simplicity, and the path toward AI-powered retrieval
- **Hire, develop, and retain SDMs and senior ICs.** Actively coach the next generation of OpenSearch leaders; have the judgment to reshape the org when the work calls for it
- **Own org-wide operational excellence** — establish and continuously raise the bar for oncall culture, incident-response discipline, RCA quality, and live-site metrics across every team in the org
- **Provide technical judgment on distributed-systems design proposals** — push back on flawed assumptions about consistency, scale, multi-tenant isolation, failure domains, blast radius, query performance, and storage economics. Develop your SDMs' distributed-systems judgment as part of their growth
- **Champion Invent and Simplify at org scale** — recognize and reward simplification work in performance reviews, drive cross-team investments that reduce complexity, and protect engineering time for refactoring and consolidation alongside feature work
- **Lead the org's adoption of AI-assisted development** — set expectations for AI use across the SDLC, establish mechanisms for engineers to share patterns and learnings, model AI fluency actively in your own daily work, and continuously raise the bar on the org's effectiveness with GenAI tooling
- **Represent the org to senior leadership** — own crisp, data-driven narratives in business reviews with directors and VPs; partner with Principal Engineers, Product Management, and the open-source community on strategy; influence cross-org and cross-service decisions
- **Make hard prioritization calls** — between new feature work, technical debt, security and compliance, regional expansion, performance investments, and operational burden reduction
- **Drive cross-org partnerships** with adjacent OpenSearch teams, with AWS Database and Analytics peers, with adjacent storage and analytics services, and with the OpenSearch open-source community

Basic Qualifications

- 10+ years of engineering experience
- 5+ years of engineering team management experience
- 10+ years of planning, designing, developing and delivering consumer software experience
- Experience partnering with product or program management teams
- Experience managing multiple concurrent programs, projects and development teams in an Agile environment

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience partnering with product and program management teams
- Experience designing and developing large scale, high-traffic applications

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&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.

USA, TX, Austin - 220,100.00 - 297,700.00 USD annually