Applied Scientist II, AWS Security - Herndon | Amazon Job

Job Description

At Amazon, Security is a top priority. Are you interested in shaping the future of security for AWS, our customers, and the broader open source community? Do you want to be part of building something with massive impact? Our AWS Security Customer Outcomes Team is looking for a strong applied scientist as we help improve the security of open source software and the safety of the software supply chain generally. 

We're looking for an ambitious team member who will bring added scientific rigor and innovation to how our customer's experience security with and through open source software. Our systems operate on a global scale across a diverse ecosystem of field teams, security requirements, and tooling which requires high velocity security innovation that scales.

We are seeking an Applied Scientist to help define, design, build, and operate AI-powered security solutions across the full lifecycle of open source software usage.  You will work alongside a team to build intelligent automation that augments manual identification, analysis, and remediation workflows, enforces security controls for agents and human experts, and provides data-driven insights to AWS leadership.

Key job responsibilities
- Architect and build AI-powered security applications and tooling — Design and implement LLM-based systems (leveraging Bedrock, SageMaker, and state of the art patterns) for intelligent code scanning, automated solution development/deployment, and remediation alternatives. 
- Transform manual processes – Reimagine and deliver change from low throughput, human-dependent processes into high volume, machine speed pipelines without sacrificing key quality metrics. 
- Collaborate with and influence other leaders – The open source ecosystem has many stakeholders, and change requires listening and supporting but also influencing and leading through action. 
- Drive proactive security automation — Build systems that identify and remediate security issues in deliverables (code, threat models, content) without requiring explicit builder consent at every step, moving from reactive reviews to proactive prevention 
- Own operational excellence — Define and maintain SLAs, monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and incident response for services you own; participate in on-call rotation to support 24/7 availability 
- Lead technical design — Produce design documents, conduct trade-off analysis, and drive alignment across organizations. 
- Design and conduct scientific research using machine learning and deep learning techniques to address complex, ambiguous problems, working backwards from customer needs to invent new approaches or extend existing ones.
- Build, train, and evaluate production-quality models using frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, applying rigorous experimentation, feature engineering, and hyperparameter optimization to improve accuracy and performance.
- Write clean, maintainable code with optimal data structures and algorithms, ensuring your components integrate directly into production systems and meet high standards for operational reliability and resource efficiency.
- Collaborate with engineering and product partners to translate scientific insights into scalable solutions, clearly communicating design decisions and trade-offs to ensure long-term maintainability.
- Contribute to the scientific community by authoring or co-authoring peer-reviewed publications, mentoring less experienced scientists, and participating in technical reviews across teams.

A day in the life
You might start your morning reviewing experiment results and refining a model architecture before syncing with engineering partners on an upcoming production integration. After lunch, you could dive into a research paper relevant to a challenge your team is tackling, then prototype a new approach and set up evaluation pipelines. Later, you may join a design review to share your findings or pair with a teammate to debug a tricky data pipeline issue. Throughout, you balance hands-on scientific exploration with collaborative problem-solving.

About the team
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.

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.

Basic Qualifications:

- 3+ years of building models for business application experience
- PhD, or Master's degree and 4+ years of CS, CE, ML or related field experience
- Experience in patents or publications at top-tier peer-reviewed conferences or journals
- Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language
- Experience in any of the following areas: algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, high-performance computing
- Experience contributing to open source projects (e.g., submitting pull requests, reviewing code, filing or triaging issues) and driving features or fixes upstream into third-party open source projects used in production systems.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience using Unix/Linux
- Experience in professional software development
- Experience maintaining or co-maintaining an open source repository, including issue handling, release management, and community moderation.
- Experience with open source security practices such as vulnerability disclosure, dependency auditing, or the use of AI to analyze and remediate vulnerabilities.

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.

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, VA, Herndon - 142,800.00 - 193,200.00 USD annually