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Senior Software Engineer, AppSTAR COMPASS

Amazon.com Inc

  • Austin, TX
  • 23 days ago

    Highlights

    Design and build the core of an event-driven platform that evaluates code changes for security risk, routes the small fraction needing human attention, and clears the rest automatically. We offer talented security professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores.

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationAustin, TX
    IndustryRetail
    Company Size10,000 employees or more
    Year Founded1994
    Websitehttp://Amazon.com/militaryroles

    Description

    Be a founding engineer on a brand-new team building security review for the LLM age. You"ll design and write the platform that evaluates every code change tens of thousands of engineers ship, and clears the vast majority without a human ever touching it.

    Security review has always been a bottleneck. A developer ships a change, waits for someone to look at it, and the security team drowns in a queue it can never fully clear. We"re ending that tradeoff. Our engine evaluates changes as they happen, decides how much scrutiny each one actually needs, and handles the common case automatically with no wait for the developer and no queue for the reviewer.

    The team is funded and forming now, and the first engineers will set the architecture. That means real design ownership, not a codebase you inherit, and experienced security engineers backing you with the risk expertise so you build against what actually matters. If you want to work on agentic systems where the correctness bar is high and the impact is measurable, this is the seat.

    Set the architecture for a greenfield platform, not maintain someone else"s

    Build agentic and automated evaluation running continuously at very high volume

    Ship something measurable: fewer manual reviews, faster releases, no added burden on developers

    Key job responsibilities

    • Design and build the core of an event-driven platform that evaluates code changes for security risk, routes the small fraction needing human attention, and clears the rest automatically.
    • Own significant technical decisions end to end: data flow, evaluation pipeline, service boundaries, storage, and the tradeoffs behind each one.
    • Build and tune the automated evaluation layers, including agentic checks, and the mechanisms that keep their decisions accurate over time.
    • Partner closely with the security team that defines how risk is evaluated, turning their criteria into production code that runs reliably at scale.
    • Work directly with the security engineers who handle escalated changes, building the queues, context, and tooling that make their reviews fast.
    • Build the developer-facing experience: clear, trustworthy visibility into what was evaluated, what happened, and why, with as close to zero required action as possible.
    • Negotiate and implement the integrations with adjacent platform and telemetry teams the system depends on.
    • Raise the engineering bar on a new team: code review, design review, testing strategy, operational readiness, and on-call fundamentals from the start.
    • Mentor engineers and help interview and grow the team as it scales.

    A day in the life

    You"ll spend most of your time designing and writing code on a system that doesn"t exist yet: how an event moves through the pipeline, where automated checks fire, what happens when confidence drops. You"ll pair with security engineers to pressure-test whether your evaluation logic catches what it should. Some days you"re in a design review defending a boundary decision, or debugging why a class of change is getting routed wrong at volume. Early on you"ll help shape the roadmap and interview the engineers who join next.

    About the team

    We decide how security attention gets spent. Our customers are the engineers shipping code every day and the security engineers reviewing it, and both are paying a tax we think is unnecessary. Our mission is to remove it: make security assurance automatic, proportional to real risk, and visible to the people it protects. We"re small, new, and unusually close to the outcome. We care more about getting the decision right than about being the ones who make it, and we"d rather encode expertise into a mechanism than hoard it.

    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.

    Why Amazon Security?

    At Amazon, security is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for security across all of Amazon's products and services. We offer talented security professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores.

    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're continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth's Best Employer. That's why you'll find endless knowledge-sharing, training, and other career-advancing resources here 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.

    About Company

    At Amazon, we don’t wait for the next big idea to present itself. We envision the shape of impossible things and then we boldly make them reality. So far, this mindset has helped us achieve some incredible things. Let’s build new systems, challenge the status quo, and design the world we want to live in. We believe the work you do here will be the best work of your life.

    Wherever you are in your career exploration, Amazon likely has an opportunity for you. Our research scientists and engineers shape the future of natural language understanding with Alexa. Fulfillment center associates around the globe send customer orders from our warehouses to doorsteps. Product managers set feature requirements, strategy, and marketing messages for brand new customer experiences. And as we grow, we’ll add jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

    It’s Always Day 1
    At Amazon, it’s always “Day 1.” Now, what does this mean and why does it matter? It means that our approach remains the same as it was on Amazon’s very first day – to make smart, fast decisions, stay nimble, invent, and stay focused on delighting our customers. In our 2016 shareholder letter, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shared his thoughts on how to keep up a Day 1 company mindset. “Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight,” he wrote. “A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.” You can read the full letter here

    Our Leadership Principles
    Our Leadership Principles help us keep a Day 1 mentality. They aren’t just a pretty inspirational wall hanging. Amazonians use them, every day, whether they’re discussing ideas for new projects, deciding on the best solution for a customer’s problem, or interviewing candidates. To read through our Leadership Principles from Customer Obsession to Bias for Action, visit https://www.amazon.jobs/principles