Software Development Manager, AWS OpenSearch, AWS OpenSearch Service

Imagine running search and analytics at any scale without thinking about clusters, capacity, or version upgrades. Where your queries return in milliseconds whether you're indexing a thousand documents or a hundred billion. Where the platform scales, heals, and secures itself so your team can focus on the questions, not the infrastructure.

That's what we build at Amazon OpenSearch Service.

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 join the OpenSearch Control Plane team as an Engineering Manager. We are responsible for a service that:

- 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
- 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 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. We are not done; this is one of many investments raising the bar for what customers can expect from a managed search service.

As an Engineering Manager in this role, you will own a core part of the OpenSearch Control Plane charter. You will work in a highly collaborative environment that attracts strong talent and offers plenty of room to grow. You will have the freedom to shape how your team operates, what mechanisms you establish to deliver results, and how you grow each engineer on the team. This role gives you direct impact on the future of Amazon OpenSearch and its continued growth.

**We don't need you to be an expert in search, retrieval, or OpenSearch internals. We value curiosity, craftsmanship, and customer obsession over knowledge in any specific technology stack.** If you have led engineering teams building cloud-scale distributed systems and you are excited about the search and analytics domain, we want to hear from you.

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. Reliability and Static Stability is a forcing function for design, not a phase after launch.

Key job responsibilities
As an Engineering Manager on the OpenSearch Control Plane team, you will:

- Lead a software development team responsible for rethinking how cloud-scale search and analytics services are provisioned, scaled, and operated
- Provide technical judgment on distributed-systems design proposals — push back on flawed assumptions about consistency, scale, failure domains, and blast radius; develop engineers' distributed-systems skill as part of their growth plan
- Champion Invent and Simplify on the team — recognize and reward simplification work in code review and performance reviews, drive engineering investments that reduce complexity, and protect engineering time for refactoring alongside feature work
- Own the operational health of the team's products — establish oncall rotations, incident-response mechanisms, and RCA discipline that scale as the team grows; drive metrics-backed improvements in availability, latency, and time-to-recover
- Lead the team'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 in your own work, and continuously raise the bar on the team's effectiveness with GenAI tooling as it evolves
- Conceive innovative solutions for customers at the intersection of multiple fields: open-source initiatives, search and log analytics, managed-service resiliency, query routing, and capacity orchestration
- Mentor engineers and provide leadership on complex technical issues, design trade-offs, and feature and schedule prioritization; contribute to the vision, goals, and technical strategy in alignment with customer needs and market opportunities
- Grow the team by hiring and developing best-in-class engineers; manage the day-to-day activities of the engineering team in an agile environment

Basic Qualifications

- 3+ years of engineering team management experience
- 7+ years of working directly within engineering teams experience
- 3+ years of designing or architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi tier web services experience
- Knowledge of engineering practices and patterns for the full software/hardware/networks development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, certification, and livesite operations
- Experience partnering with product or program management teams

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience in communicating with users, other technical teams, and senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy
- Experience in recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills, and make them more effective, product software engineers

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 - 184,900.00 - 250,200.00 USD annually