Software Development Manager, 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 an experienced software development manager to lead 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 sophisticated threat actors. You will grow and lead a multidisciplinary team of software engineers, applied scientists, and security engineers building 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.

Responsibilities

• Own the full software development lifecycle for the platform, including architecture and design reviews, roadmap planning, code review, operational excellence, on‑call and live‑site response, and hiring plans.
• Set technical direction, own delivery across workstreams, recruit and develop the team, and stay hands‑on with code and data to lead designs, unblock investigations, and review the hardest changes.
• Establish model alignment, evaluation, and interaction patterns that make automated decisions trustworthy at scale.
• Identify automation opportunities to replace manual security operations while maintaining rigorous controls.
• Review agent and detection designs before production to ensure guardrails, auditable decisions, and safe degradation when models err.
• Evaluate incoming threat intelligence, reshape priorities, and adjust the roadmap based on emerging adversary capabilities.
• Drive sprint execution, balance research ambition with delivery velocity, and coordinate with security operations teams to reflect real workflows.
• Collaborate with principal engineers and partner security teams on telemetry ingestion, detection deployment, and automated response integration.
• Maintain a production‑mandated R&D platform that runs continuously across a global site portfolio and executes actions with real operational consequences.

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, learning and curiosity are core values. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest security challenges requires celebrating a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices.

Training & career growth

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

Work/Life balance

We value work‑life harmony. Flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture, ensuring success at work never comes at the expense of home life.

Basic qualifications

• 3+ years of engineering team management experience.
• 7+ years of engineering experience.
• 8+ years of leading the definition and development of multi‑tier web services.
• Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.
• 5+ years of designing, building, and operating distributed systems, including data pipelines, event‑driven architectures, or stream processing systems.
• Experience leading and influencing your team or organization, or experience developing and deploying LLMs in production on GPUs, Neuron, TPU, or other AI acceleration hardware.
• Experience aligning research, engineering, and operational delivery across science and engineering peers.
• Proficiency in at least one of Python, Rust, or Java, with the ability to read, review, and write production code on the team’s stack.
• U.S. citizenship (required by export control laws).

Preferred qualifications

• Experience communicating with users, technical teams, and senior leadership to collect requirements, describe software product features, technical designs, and product strategy.
• Experience recruiting, hiring, mentoring/coaching, and managing teams of Software Engineers to improve their skills and effectiveness.
• Experience communicating results to senior leadership or building financial and operational reports/data sets that inform business decision‑making.
• Experience leading teams that operate graph databases or knowledge‑graph platforms (Neptune, Neo4j, or equivalent) at production scale.
• Experience leading teams that build real‑time event correlation or stream processing systems at terabyte scale.
• Experience building human‑in‑the‑loop approval workflows and staged rollout systems for AI‑driven automation where wrong actions have material operational consequences.
• Experience designing observability and instrumentation systems for production ML or AI workloads, including trace collection, evaluation harnesses, and cost/latency monitoring for LLM‑based systems.
• Experience in security operations or related domains.
• Experience growing a small founding team into a multi‑team organization, including spinning out adjacent teams and managing across distinct technical missions.

Pay

Base salary range: $184,900 – $250,200 USD annually (locations: Arlington, VA; Herndon, VA; Bellevue, WA). Final compensation will be determined based on experience, qualifications, and location, and 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 and mental health support.
• Medical Advice Line.
• Flexible Spending Accounts.
• Adoption and surrogacy reimbursement coverage.
• 401(k) matching.
• Paid time off and parental leave.