Amazon's Security Software Development Operations (SSDO) team is seeking an experienced Software Development Engineer II to drive architectural decisions and complex system design for security automation platforms. In this role, you will own software features end-to-end, design cohesive implementations for security tools, and mentor fellow engineers while delivering solutions that protect Amazon's global infrastructure. You will work at the intersection of AI/ML, cloud security, and data sovereignty-building platforms that enable security teams to operate at scale across opt-in regions and sovereign cloud environments.
As an SDE II on this team, you will influence technical direction within the team, balance customer requirements with operational needs, and demonstrate operational excellence across all work. You will design solutions for difficult problems where answers are not immediately obvious, bringing clarity and identifying simple, elegant designs.
Key job responsibilities
• Own software features for security automation platforms, AI-enabled chatbot and data enrichment tooling, driving them from design through deployment and maintenance.
• Design and architect complex system components including RAG-based AI implementations, clean room architectures, and cross-platform intelligence integrations with limited guidance, making design tradeoffs that balance security, performance, and maintainability.
• Provide constructive code review direction to peers including senior engineers, ensuring code quality, security best practices, and adherence to DevSecOps principles across all team deliverables.
• Actively mentor junior engineers and train new teammates on team software, security architecture patterns, and development processes.
• Collaborate with Security Engineers who define security requirements and threat modeling, translating those requirements into scalable technical implementations.
• Drive improvements to the team's development and testing processes, operational runbooks, and software quality standards.
• Engage with Director-level stakeholders to communicate technical decisions, project status, and business value of security automation initiatives.
A day in the life
Your morning might begin with a design review for a new sovereignty monitoring feature, where you evaluate approaches for implementing continuous compliance checks across opt-in regions using AWS Control Tower and Resource Control Policies. Mid-morning, you conduct code reviews for a junior teammate's implementation of a document sanitization pipeline, providing constructive feedback on error handling patterns and suggesting architectural improvements. After lunch, you lead a technical discussion with Security Engineers about exception handling patterns for AI/ML workloads within one of Amazon's Dedicated Clouds. You spend the afternoon designing the next phase of the GEIR chatbot's RAG architecture, making tradeoffs between retrieval accuracy and latency while ensuring compliance with security control standards. Before end of day, you update your design document and prepare a brief for your manager on the projected impact of the automated audit production system.
About the team
The SSDO embedded development team is a small, high-impact group within Amazon's security organization. We build the tools and platforms that security professionals rely on daily-from AI-powered service teams facing consultants that reduce analyst workload by 60-70%, to automated monitoring systems that maintain separation between sensitive investigation teams. Our work spans five distinct teams and directly supports security operations across multiple business units. We operate in a matrix structure where security domain experts define the "what" and "why," and our engineering team owns the "how". We value operational excellence, customer obsession, and the ability to deliver simple solutions to complex security challenges.
Diverse Experiences
Amazon Security values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn't followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don't let it stop you from applying.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- 1+ years of software development engineer or related occupational experience
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- 3+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including 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, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, WA, Seattle - 143,700.00 - 194,400.00 USD annually
