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

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Drive "design-as-code" practices: build production-quality prototypes and commit directly to production codebases (React, TypeScript, OUI) to collapse design-engineering feedback loops.
• 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.
• Establish UX quality benchmarks and lead critique sessions, elevating craft standards globally across the team.
• Mentor and develop a team of senior designers, providing technical guidance and career development.
• Represent Design in executive reviews with data-driven recommendations and clear strategic narratives that connect design decisions to business outcomes ($400M+ growth portfolio).
• 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.

Requirements

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

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

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

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

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

Experience leading or mentoring a team of senior designers

Qualifications

• Direct experience in search platforms, observability/APM, or cloud infrastructure products
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML product design, particularly agentic patterns (autonomous agents, human-in-the-loop workflows, progressive autonomy)
• Experience building from 0→1 and establishing product-market fit for new product lines
• Experience designing multi-surface experiences (console, IDE extensions, CLI, MCP/API-driven interfaces)
• Proficiency with AI-assisted design and development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Kiro, v0)
• Experience with open-source communities and developer ecosystem design
• Published thought leadership or recognized contributions to the design community
• Experience with migration/onboarding experience design at enterprise scale