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 network connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world. We are looking for a senior software development engineer to be a founding engineer on the Engineering and R&D team within Leo Infrastructure and IP Security. The team defends the manufacturing lines, launch sites, and global ground infrastructure behind the constellation from the most sophisticated threat actors on the planet. You will build a neuro‑symbolic reasoning platform: large language model agents combined with a knowledge graph and real‑time asset state store that ground every conclusion in verifiable fact, so every automated decision is auditable. The platform automates incident response, threat analysis, offensive security testing, and detection authoring, backed by a high‑throughput streaming pipeline that takes a detection from concept to production in hours. This is a unique opportunity to build a security platform from early stage through global scale, at a consequence level few teams ever encounter.

Export Control Requirement: Candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

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 the distributed systems that carry the platform, from telemetry ingestion and real‑time correlation through agent execution and observability, in an environment where a wrong automated action has real operational consequences.
• Drive automation relentlessly: replace manual security operations with software, build evaluation and back‑testing infrastructure that proves a model or detection is correct before it is trusted in production, and create deployment guardrails that prevent human error in high‑consequence environments.
• Partner with applied scientists to turn research prototypes into production capabilities, mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and set the standard for code quality across the team.
• Operate what you build, owning operational health, incident response, and reliability for services the security organization depends on.

A Day in the Life

One morning you might lead a design review for a new detection pipeline stage, challenging the team to eliminate every manual step and asking what happens when each component fails or is fed hostile input. That afternoon you could be writing code to tighten the guardrails on an agent tool, or profiling the correlation path to shave seconds off the time from event to detection. The next day you might investigate an anomalous pattern in your service metrics, treating it as hostile until proven otherwise, then work with a scientist to back‑test a candidate detection against retained telemetry before it ships. You will obsess over the two latencies that define the platform—the time from event to detection and the time from detection to containment action—and question any process that relies on a human doing the right thing under pressure. The team is new, so the architecture decisions you make now will carry the platform for years.

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 the security pillar teams operate on, moving security operations from manual triage to correlation‑based detection, automated response, and agentic AI. The team is composed of applied scientists, software engineers, and security engineers working across physical and digital security domains.

Inclusive Team Culture

In Amazon Security, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest security challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices.

Training & Career Growth

We continuously raise our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. You’ll find endless knowledge‑sharing, training, and other career‑advancing resources to help you develop into a better‑rounded professional.

Work/Life Balance

We value work‑life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve.

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 and scaling) of new and existing systems
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead, or leading an engineering team
• 3+ years of experience as a mentor, tech lead, or leading an engineering team
• 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+