AmazonSoftware Development Engineer, AWS OpenSearch Service
Amazon is hiring a Software Development Engineer, AWS OpenSearch Service in Austin, United States. It pays $144k-$194k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.
Level's read on this job
- Little AI ●○○○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: aI is not part of the work.
- The posting mentions Java, Rust and Python among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a mid-level role.
- Amazon has 20,000+ other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Software Development Engineer working on the AWS OpenSearch control plane and intelligent retrieval infrastructure.
That's what we build.
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. 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.
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, and Go. 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
- 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
- Treat operations as core engineering — own the systems you build 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 concrete deliverables; prototype, test, and validate
- Continually challenge what exists and explore what should change to better serve customers
Basic qualifications
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
- 1+ years of designing and developing large-scale, multi-tiered, multi-threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using: C#, C++, Java, or Perl experience
- 1+ years of Object Oriented Design experience
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
- Experience programming with at least one software programming language
Preferred qualifications
- 3+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent
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 - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually
How we rate this
Software Development Engineer, AWS OpenSearch Service at Amazon rates 10 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $144k
- Typical software engineer job
- $167k
This posting starts 14% below the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where cloud computing was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where search engines was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where backend was part of your work. What did you do?
- Walk me through how you've used Java in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Distributed Systems, Cloud Computing, Search Engines, Backend, and Java. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
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