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. The Engineering and R&D team within Leo Infrastructure and IP Security is seeking a Software Development Engineer to join the founding cohort. The team defends manufacturing lines, launch sites, and global ground infrastructure from sophisticated threat actors. You will build a neurosymbolic reasoning platform that combines large language model agents with a knowledge graph and real‑time asset state store, enabling auditable automated decisions for incident response, threat analysis, offensive security testing, and detection authoring.

Eligibility: Candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, a U.S. permanent resident (Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or asylee due to export control requirements.

Responsibilities

• Own end‑to‑end development of software features across the platform: clarify requirements, design, code, instrument, and maintain production health.
• Deliver high‑consequence features such as the live state‑of‑the‑world record, consolidated detection signals, automated triage with human‑approved containment, and self‑service workflows that replace multi‑day manual processes.
• Write independent code, make design trade‑offs with guidance from senior engineers, review teammates’ code, and operate the systems you build.
• Debug performance regressions, profile pipeline stages, and add metrics to prevent future issues.
• Collaborate with applied scientists to back‑test detections against retained telemetry before shipping.
• Automate root‑cause remediation for operational tickets.
• Focus on reducing latency from event to detection and from detection to containment, eliminating manual steps wherever possible.

A day in the life

One morning you might ship a correlation feature that joins device, custody, and access events to surface patterns no single data source shows. In the afternoon you could be debugging a detection latency regression, profiling the slowed pipeline stage, and adding a metric to catch it next time. The next day you might pair with an applied scientist to back‑test a candidate detection against retained telemetry, then automate away the root cause of an operational ticket so no one handles it again.

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 platforms and tooling for security pillar teams, 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.

Team culture

• Inclusive culture that encourages learning, curiosity, and diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices.
• Continuous knowledge‑sharing, training, and career‑advancing resources to help professionals grow.
• Emphasis on work‑life harmony with flexible work hours and arrangements.

Basic qualifications

• 3+ years of non‑internship professional software development experience.
• 2+ years of non‑internship design or architecture experience (design patterns, reliability, scaling) of new and existing systems.
• 1+ years designing and developing large‑scale, multi‑tiered, multi‑threaded, embedded or distributed software applications, tools, systems, and services using C#, C++, Java, or Perl.
• Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.
• Experience programming with at least one software programming language.

Preferred qualifications

• 3+ years of full software development life cycle experience, including coding standards, code reviews, source control, build processes, testing, and operations.
• Experience in one or more domains: access‑control systems, network security, application‑ and system‑development security, security architecture, cryptography, or operations security.
• Performance optimization expertise, including memory management, multi‑threading, and profiling production systems.
• Knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals such as consensus, message passing, and fault tolerance.
• Experience with real‑time event correlation or stream processing systems.
• Experience building systems that integrate with LLM APIs or agent frameworks.
• Experience with graph databases, knowledge‑graph platforms, or large‑scale data modeling (e.g., Neptune, Neo4j, or equivalent).

Compensation and benefits

Base salary range: $143,700 – $194,400 USD annually (locations: Arlington, VA and Herndon, VA).

• Sign‑on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs).
• Comprehensive health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription), Basic Life & AD&D insurance, supplemental life options, Employee Assistance Program, mental health support, medical advice line, and flexible spending accounts.
• Adoption and surrogacy reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off and parental leave.