Software Development Engineer - Amazon OpenSearch, OpenSearch Core

Are you interested in expanding the core search and query engine capabilities of a highly scalable open source log analytics and search platform? Do you like collaborating and working on a decentralized open-source model, but also have ownership on real deployments of that project? Do you have experience working directly with Lucene and understand how features like Lucene codecs, facets, similarity functions, k-NN, and queries work? Do you get the differences between dense and sparse vector search? Do your peers consider you a mentor and do you enjoy scaling yourself by helping others learn?

OpenSearch is a community-driven, Apache 2.0-licensed open source search and analytics suite built on Apache Lucene that makes it easy to ingest, search, visualize, and analyze data. As a community-driven project, multiple companies and individuals share responsibility for directing and contributing to the OpenSearch Project. As one of the larger integrators of the project, AWS OpenSearch and AWS OpenSearch Serverless, you will see the impact of your open source contributions directly and see how these contributions make our customers successful. We are hiring software engineers proficient in Lucene to help bring more capabilities and performance improvements into Lucene and OpenSearch. This is a rare opportunity to work with other talented engineers passionate about search not only at AWS, but also with folks at other companies contributing to both Lucene, OpenSearch and other open source projects.

Key job responsibilities

As a Software Engineer on our team, you will:

• Design, develop and maintain software by collaborating with the open source community and internal AWS stakeholders on Apache Lucene and OpenSearch.
• Have support from AWS in contributing to Apache Lucene as well as OpenSearch. If you are already a Lucene committer, we will continue to support your work there; if you are not, we will give you room to become one.
• Produce bullet-proof code that is robust, efficient and maintainable; our primary languages are Java, C/C++, and Python.
• Exercise your expert knowledge in large scale distributed system design and engineering best practices.
• Follow and set best practices and standards to ensure the high quality contributions.
• Maintain effective communication and collaboration with partner teams, both local and remote, in completing interdependent work items
• Work closely with multiple teams across search service organization and help them understand and implement best practices.
• Advocate for open source, both inside and outside the company.
• Engage with developers and management in seeing our open source release operationalized appropriately with monitoring, alerting, testing.
• Join a great group of motivated, top-notch, people and work with them to solve challenging problems in a fun, collaborative environment

Basic qualifications

• 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
• 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team
• Experience building search applications on OpenSearch, Solr, Cassandra, MongoDB, or other similar platforms with an understanding of how they work and why.
• A role model mentor and technical lead with a strong ability to break down work, delegate to other engineers, and help them learn and grow. You know when to be hands on and when to back off.
• Experience working with Apache Lucene or other inverted index storage libraries and an understanding of data structures, storage formats, and query capabilities that impact performance and usability.

Preferred qualifications

• 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
• Master"s degree in computer science or equivalent
• Experience in building large scale, extensible user experience platform on a public cloud
• Experience contributing to the Lucene project and you are a committer or on a path to becoming one.
• Deep understanding of information retrieval, search, search similarity and scoring, and the storage formats and data structures that make search different than other types of applications.