Principal Security Engineer, Advertising Security

At Amazon, we are obsessed with customer trust. To earn that trust in an environment as vast and varied as Amazon’s requires the applied skills of smart security engineers and experienced, innovative security leaders willing to tackle challenges at dizzying scales.

We are seeking a Principal Security Engineer with deep Advertising experience who is excited to raise the bar on weaving security and privacy throughout our product development lifecycle and equipping our partners to seamlessly maintain the highest standards. You’ll partner across Amazon Security and Advertising in service of our customers, leveraging existing world-class practices and contributing your own solutions for massive impact. As a Principal Engineer at Amazon, you’ll work on our hardest problems, bringing technical leadership and a pragmatic vision to solve challenges at a massive scale. If you enjoy working in a rapidly changing startup-culture environment and influencing the strategic direction of a global organization, this position will provide you with an engaging and challenging opportunity.

This position may be located in Seattle WA, Boston MA, or Herndon VA.

Key job responsibilities
A successful candidate needs to have excellent communication skills to share your knowledge with a diverse audience. You will leverage your deep Advertising security expertise to partner with other senior leaders to drive strategy and security improvements. You also love working directly with software developers to understand their needs, and design security systems and solutions that enable our teams to operate more effectively, securely and safely at scale.

A Security Engineer at Amazon is expected to be strong in multiple domains and provide contributions to the Amazon Service teams, infrastructure teams and administrative teams. Security engineers are expected to develop elegant solutions to complex business problems and apply appropriate technologies while following security engineering best practices. You are also expected to mentor more junior engineers and be a security thought leader for the organization.

A day in the life
We are obsessed with creating Advertising solutions that surprise and delight our customers while earning and keeping their trust every day. In this role, you will have the opportunity to engage with systems that are at the cutting edge of technology and work directly with teams across Amazon Security and Advertising. You'll identify and communicate opportunities to improve our security posture. You'll innovate, build, and collaborate to create solutions to complex technical challenges.

About the team
We have a team culture that encourages innovation and we expect team members and management alike to take high degree of ownership for their program vision and execution of ideas. We love great ideas that come from everywhere, and are not limited by 'not invented here'. We are obsessed with earning and keeping our customers' trust.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Security, Computer Science, Risk Management, Engineering, Math, Statistics or related discipline, or 15+ years’ equivalent technology experience
• 10 + years of experience in identifying security issues and risks, and developing mitigation plans
• 10+ years of experience in network, system, or software architecture; design, implementation, support, and evaluation of security-focused tools and services
• 4+ years of scripting or programming experience in Ruby, Python, Shell/BASH scripting, Java, C/C++, C*, Perl, or other languages
• 10 + years of combined experience in advertising security and one or more of the following areas: cryptography, web and network protocols, data structures and algorithms, software development, threat modeling, pen tests, or vulnerability assessments
• Deep hands-on technical expertise in Cyber Security and at least one relevant technical area: privacy-enhancing technologies, identity and access management, large scale systems engineering, queuing and messaging, Linux networking, performance analysis, software-defined networking, etc.
• Have excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to present complex technical information in a clear and concise manner to a variety of audiences
• Experience managing complex projects, with significant bottom-line impact
• Experience playing a visionary technical leadership role within a large organization

Preferred Qualifications

• Have a clear understanding of cloud computing services/deployment architecture
• Demonstrate innovative security approaches in non-traditional IT environments
• Have experience generating automated metrics to measure service and program effectiveness and consistency
• Have experience in the development of security products
• Demonstrable teamwork skills and resourcefulness
• Possess self-drive to keep moving things forward even in the face of ambiguity and imperfect knowledge (avoid “analysis paralysis”)
• Strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive
• Sharp analytical abilities and proven design skills
• Experience defining cyber-secure architectures, design and development of asynchronous messaging platforms
• Proven track record of leading the delivery and operations of large-scale, mission-critical distributed systems
• Knowledge of networking protocols and their implementations
• Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, asynchronous architectures and distributed algorithms
• Deep understanding of system performance tradeoffs, load balancing, and engineering for high availability
• Masters or PhD in Computer Science or Computer Security.

Amazon is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation, please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/disability/us.


Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. The base pay for this position ranges from $151,500/year in our lowest geographic market up to $294,700/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Amazon is a total compensation company. Dependent on the position offered, equity, sign-on payments, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. For more information, please visit https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/employee-benefits. Applicants should apply via our internal or external career site.