Principal UX Designer, AWS Search, Security, Observability, & Governance

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

2. Architect and govern agentic design patterns across the OpenSearch 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 OpenSearch 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, TypeScript, OUI) to collapse design-engineering feedback loops.

6. Scale team impact through the OUI design system and DesignBrain 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 OpenSearch 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 OpenSearch 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 OpenSearch Service, Serverless, AI agents (Olly, Relevance Agent, Agent Skills), and MCP Apps. Our work spans the AWS Console, standalone web UIs, IDE integrations, and CLI, wherever builders work.

We operate as an AI-native builder team. Every designer works directly alongside engineering in shared builder pods, using tools like DesignBrain (our multi-agent design intelligence system) to accelerate research synthesis, user flow generation, and UX quality review. We don't hand off specs and wait. We prototype, commit production code (178+ commits, 44+ merged to mainline), run experiments, and push toward production. In H1 2026, six designers produced seven major launches in six months, including experiences adopted by Nintendo, Dow Jones, and 200+ enterprise customers.

The problems we're solving are genuinely hard: How do you design trust into AI agents that tune search relevance or triage production incidents autonomously? How do you make agentic reasoning legible to both search engineers and SREs? How do you collapse onboarding from weeks to minutes for enterprises migrating 7,500+ Solr customers or $50M Splunk deployments? If that's the kind of challenge that pulls you in, you'll find your people here.

Basic Qualifications

1. 12+ years of professional experience in UX/Product Design, with at least 4 years at Staff/Principal level (or equivalent) at a top-tier technology company

2. Demonstrable portfolio of shipped enterprise-scale B2B products, with emphasis on data-intensive interfaces (search, analytics, observability, or developer tools)

3. Deep expertise in design systems — architecture, governance, component libraries, and cross-team adoption at scale

4. Strong technical fluency: ability to read, review, and contribute to production code (HTML/CSS/JS, React/TypeScript preferred)

5. Experience designing for complex data visualization — dashboards, query interfaces, log analysis, or monitoring systems

6. Track record of influencing product strategy at the organizational level, not just feature-level execution

7. Experience leading or mentoring a team of senior designers

Preferred Qualifications

1. Direct experience in search platforms, observability/APM, or cloud infrastructure products

2. Hands-on experience with AI/ML product design, particularly agentic patterns (autonomous agents, human-in-the-loop workflows, progressive autonomy)

3. Experience building from 0→1 and establishing product-market fit for new product lines

4. Experience designing multi-surface experiences (console, IDE extensions, CLI, MCP/API-driven interfaces)

5. Proficiency with AI-assisted design and development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Kiro, v0)

6. Experience with open-source communities and developer ecosystem design

7. Published thought leadership or recognized contributions to the design community

8. Experience with migration/onboarding experience design at enterprise scale

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees, supervisors, and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees, supervisors, and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal, state, and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above, as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies, exercise sound judgment, effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others, exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism, and safeguard business operations and the Company’s reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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, CA, Santa Clara - 180,300.00 - 244,000.00 USD annually
USA, NY, New York - 180,300.00 - 244,000.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Bellevue - 164,000.00 - 221,800.00 USD annually