Security Engineer II, Ads Security

The Ads Security organization at Amazon is dedicated to creating innovative technical solutions that detect, assess, and mitigate security risks within Amazon's Advertising businesses. Our vision is to accelerate the development velocity of the Advertising business by ensuring that our products are inherently secure. We are seeking a talented Security Engineer to join our team, where you will have the opportunity to contribute to securing web applications and services critical to delivering exceptional customer and partner experiences at scale in Amazon Ads.

The ideal candidate

You are a threat hunter first, with a strong builder's mindset and a track record of proactively uncovering and stopping advanced threats that evade traditional detection. You have built and deployed AI-powered hunting mechanisms in production, measured how much faster and deeper they let you hunt, and iterated based on what you caught.

You have deep, hands-on expertise in threat hunting fundamentals: hypothesis-driven hunting, adversary tradecraft, the MITRE ATT&CK framework, behavioral and anomaly analysis, log and telemetry analysis, and turning findings into durable detections. You understand the specific tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPS) that malicious actors use to compromise systems, evade detection, and achieve their objectives. You are an expert in identifying indicators or compromise (IoCs) and think about threats from first principles.

You have proven experience using AI to conduct the full threat hunting lifecycle: generating and testing hypotheses, take action and response to findings, have a rigorous documentation of findings, and in creating detection feedback. You are experienced in correlating signals across massive datasets, triaging leads, and surfacing the needle in the haystack at a scale and speed that manual hunting cannot reach. You are comfortable navigating ambiguity, defining what "good" looks like for a hunt before starting it, and influencing others through technical depth and clear communication. You set the bar for hunting rigor on your team and raise the level of everyone around you.

You are energized by the opportunity to pioneer a new discipline: applying generative AI and agentic systems to threat hunting challenges that were previously intractable through manual investigation or static rules alone. Your role will be pivotal in ensuring the protection of customer data and critical infrastructure within the Amazon Ads organization.

Key job responsibilities

- End-to-end ownership of AI-powered threat hunting capabilities - design, build, maintain, and expand hunting workflows that proactively surface threats at scale.

- Conduct hypothesis-driven threat hunts across large-scale attack surfaces, using AI to accelerate signal correlation, lead triage, and anomaly discovery.

- Develop and maintain agentic AI hunting workflows that autonomously generate hypotheses, gather evidence, and investigate leads with human-in-the-loop oversight.

- Build evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to continuously measure and improve the accuracy, recall, and reliability of AI-driven threat hunting, minimizing false negatives and alert fatigue.

- Operationalize hunt findings ensuring appropriate action and response is taken, and converting them into durable, high-fidelity detections, and close detection coverage gaps.

- Map hunting coverage and findings to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and known adversary tradecraft relevant to Amazon Ads.

- Partner with other teams at Amazon to fine-tune and adapt models for specific hunting use cases, including anomaly detection, log analysis, and natural language security querying.

- Define technical roadmaps for AI-powered threat hunting initiatives, influencing org-level priorities and driving alignment across partner teams.

- Author and review technical design documents, threat models, and hunt playbooks for AI-driven hunting capabilities.

- Mentor engineers across the organization on threat hunting best practices and the use of AI/ML in hunting and detection.

- Establish operational excellence standards for AI hunting systems, including monitoring, alerting, and human-in-the-loop safeguards.

- Participate in on-call rotations including Ads Security, threat hunting, detection services, ensuring rapid response to emerging threats, production incidents, and service degradation.

- Provide regular updates to leadership on hunt outcomes, emerging threats, risks, and strategic decisions through written narratives and review mechanisms.

- Contribute to operational planning (OP1/OP2) including goal setting, resource planning, and roadmap prioritization for the team.

- Participate in helping to grow and develop a high-performing threat hunting team.

- Support team development through code reviews, technical mentoring, career coaching, and fostering a culture of continuous learning.

- Perform ad-hoc security-related initiatives as needed.

About the team

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.

Why Amazon Security?

At Amazon, security is central to maintaining customer trust. We offer talented security professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience across cloud, AI/ML, retail, and more.

Inclusive Team Culture

In Amazon Security, it's in our nature to learn and be curious. Addressing the toughest security challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices.

Work/Life Balance

We value work-life harmony. 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

- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

- 3+ years of programming in Python, Ruby, Go, Swift, Java, .Net, C++ or similar object oriented language experience

- 3+ years of threat hunting, threat detection, incident response, or threat intelligence experience, including hands-on hypothesis-driven hunting across large-scale log and telemetry data.

- 2+ years of demonstrated experience using AI/ML technologies to perform threat hunting activities - including prompt engineering, LLM integration, or ML pipeline development applied to hypothesis generation, signal correlation, or anomaly detection.

- Hands-on experience with the MITRE ATTACK framework, adversary tradecraft, and translating hunt findings into detections.

- Proficiency with query and analysis of large security datasets (e.g., SIEM, data lakes, log analytics platforms).

- Experience with cloud security architecture (AWS preferred), including IAM, VPC, KMS, and security monitoring services.

Preferred qualifications

- CCSP (Certified Cloud Security Professional) or CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) or CFR (CyberSec First Responder) or Cloud+ or CySA+ (CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst) or GCED (GIAC Certified Enterprise Defender) or GICSP (Global Industrial Cyber Security Professional) or PenTest+

- Demonstrated success applying generative AI or agentic systems to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) or mean time to respond (MTTR) in threat hunting or security operations.

- Experience building agentic AI workflows or autonomous investigation pipelines for security use cases.

- Familiarity with Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, or similar managed AI/ML services for production model deployment.

- Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures for security knowledge bases, threat intelligence, and hunt documentation.

- Contributions to open source security/hunting tools or published research in AI for threat detection and cybersecurity.

- Experience developing detections and hunts against advanced persistent threats (APTs) and evolving adversary behaviors.

- Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Cybersecurity, or a related field.

- AWS certifications (Security Specialty, Solutions Architect, or Machine Learning Specialty).

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, WA, BELLEVUE - 159,300.00 - 202,400.00 USD annually