Senior Security Engineer

Amazon Optics is seeking a Senior Security Engineer to help own security posture across distributed services deployed to AWS regions. The role focuses on physical and logical security, including architecture reviews, threat modeling, investigations, and mentorship that support long-term risk reduction at fleet scale.

Role Overview

You will lead security activities for services supporting physical access control, alarm monitoring, video surveillance, and device management. Working within an AWS Security organization, you will help ensure secure design through architecture guidance, scalable mitigations, and repeatable security practices across a fully Infrastructure as Code environment.

Onsite Location

Annapolis Junction, MD (onsite)

Compensation

USD 178,400 - 226,700 per year

Key Responsibilities

• Lead security architecture reviews and threat modeling for services deployed across all AWS regions in a fully Infrastructure as Code environment, identifying one-way-door technical decisions and advocating for sustainable long-term solutions
• Design and implement security controls that centralize platform protections rather than leaving individual service teams to solve independently
• Build security frameworks, runbooks, and rubrics for new problem domains to enable repeatable and scalable security outcomes across the organization
• Drive security investigations, escalation handling, and root-cause analysis through COE processes to ensure systemic issues are permanently resolved
• Review code and architecture from engineering peers to support secure design, least privilege, proper authentication and authorization, and safe data handling
• Influence security decisions across partner organizations by balancing risk trade-offs with business velocity and identifying pragmatic compensating controls
• Mentor and develop security engineers, contributing to hiring assessments, promotion evaluations, and career guidance

Required Qualifications

• 4+ years of non-internship experience troubleshooting systems, analyzing logs, or automating complex tasks with command line tools
• 5+ years of experience identifying security issues and risks and developing mitigation plans
• 4+ years of non-internship scripting, programming, and security code review in common programming languages
• Knowledge of at least two of: Scala, Java, Python, C/C++, or Go
• Non-internship experience identifying industry security vulnerabilities, attack patterns, and remediation techniques
• Experience mentoring, serving as a tech lead, or leading an engineering team

Technologies

• Scala, Java, Python, C/C++, Go
• Infrastructure as Code
• COE processes

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience applying threat modeling or other risk identification techniques or equivalent
• Experience with security in service-oriented architectures, microservices, and web services

About the Team

Amazon Optics is part of an AWS Security organization. Services secure physical access, monitor alarms, manage video surveillance, and track device health across hundreds of data centers and corporate facilities globally. The team operates at the intersection of physical and logical security, building software that integrates with real-world hardware while meeting availability, scalability, and security standards for AWS.

Engineers own critical systems end-to-end and are empowered to solve problems that protect every AWS customer.

Diverse Experiences

Amazon Security values diverse experiences. Candidates are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet all qualifications.

Security and Customer Trust

At Amazon, security is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. The organization creates and maintains a high bar for security across Amazon’s products and services.

Inclusive Team Culture

• Learn and remain curious in Amazon Security
• Participate in ongoing DEI events and learning experiences that inspire embracing uniqueness
• Seek out and celebrate diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices to address security challenges

Training and Career Growth

The role includes knowledge-sharing, training, and other resources to support career advancement.

Work-Life Balance

Amazon values work-life harmony with flexible work hours and arrangements.

Benefits

• 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
• Parental leave
• Sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)