Senior Software Development Engineer, Leo Security

About the Role

Amazon Leo is a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites that will provide low‑latency, high‑speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities worldwide. The senior software development engineer will be a founding engineer on the Engineering and R&D team within Leo Infrastructure and IP Security, building a neuro‑symbolic reasoning platform that combines large language model agents with a knowledge graph and real‑time asset state store. The platform automates incident response, threat analysis, offensive security testing, and detection authoring, and drives a high‑throughput streaming pipeline that moves detections from concept to production in hours.

Key Responsibilities

• Own architecture decisions across the platform, providing system‑wide design guidance and ensuring services are secure, scalable, and operationally simple.
• Design and build distributed systems for telemetry ingestion, real‑time correlation, agent execution, and observability, where automated actions have real operational consequences.
• Drive automation by replacing manual security operations with software, building evaluation and back‑testing infrastructure, and creating deployment guardrails to prevent human error.
• Partner with applied scientists to turn research prototypes into production capabilities, mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and set code‑quality standards.
• Operate the built services, owning operational health, incident response, and reliability for the security organization.

A Day in the Life

You may lead a design review for a new detection pipeline stage, challenging the team to eliminate manual steps and consider failure modes. Later you might write code to tighten guardrails on an agent tool or profile the correlation path to reduce latency. On another day you could investigate anomalous service metrics, treat them as hostile until proven otherwise, and collaborate with a scientist to back‑test a detection against retained telemetry before it ships. Throughout, you obsess over the latencies from event to detection and from detection to containment, questioning any process that relies on perfect human action under pressure.

About the Team

Leo Infrastructure and IP Security protects the people, facilities, hardware, and supply chain behind a global satellite constellation. The Engineering and R&D team builds the platforms and tooling that security pillar teams operate on, moving security operations from manual triage to correlation‑based detection, automated response, and agentic AI. The team includes applied scientists, software engineers, and security engineers working across physical and digital security domains.

Inclusive Team Culture

Amazon Security fosters a culture of curiosity and continuous learning, with ongoing DEI events and learning experiences that celebrate diverse ideas, perspectives, and voices.

Training & Career Growth

The organization continuously raises its performance bar, offering endless knowledge‑sharing, training, and career‑advancing resources to help you become a better‑rounded professional.

Work/Life Balance

Flexible work hours and arrangements are part of the culture, emphasizing harmony between professional success and personal well‑being.

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of non‑internship professional software development experience.
• 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language.
• 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability, scaling) of new and existing systems.
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead, or leading an engineering team (3+ years).
• Experience with performance optimization, including memory management, multi‑threading, SIMD, cache coherence, and lock‑free or zero‑copy designs.
• Experience designing and building distributed systems, including consensus, message passing, fault tolerance, and real‑time stream processing at terabyte scale.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of full software development life cycle experience, covering coding standards, code reviews, source control, build processes, testing, and operations.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent.
• Experience building and operating systems that integrate with LLM APIs or agent frameworks (tool‑use orchestration, prompt management, execution monitoring).
• Experience with graph databases, knowledge graph platforms, or large‑scale data modeling (Neptune, Neo4j, or equivalent).
• Experience building multi‑agent orchestration systems with dependency management, parallel execution, and failure handling.
• Experience designing observability and instrumentation systems for production ML or AI workloads.
• Experience with threat modeling, secure coding, identity management and authentication, cryptography, or network security.

Pay

Salary range: $168,100 – $227,400 USD annually (locations: Arlington, VA and Herndon, VA). Compensation includes sign‑on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs).

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription).
• Basic Life & AD&D insurance with optional supplemental life plans.
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and mental health support.
• Medical advice line.
• Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Adoption and surrogacy reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off.
• Parental leave.