Security Engineer Manager Role at Amazon, New York NY

Amazon's Specialized Businesses Security team is seeking a Security Engineer Manager, SBS Specialized Detections to lead its Specialized Detections team in New York, NY . This full-time leadership role is forward-driving: you will define what this team builds, not maintain what exists today. You will own two detection workstreams that address gaps no other team at Amazon covers—one targeting vulnerability classes outside the reach of standard Builder Tools, the other delivering bespoke detection capabilities for SBS teams facing business-specific security risks.

Core Responsibilities of the Security Engineer Manager

In this role, you will split your time between people leadership and technical direction. Your mandate is to build, hire, and develop a team of security engineers focused on detection engineering and security automation. Key responsibilities include:

• Technical Strategy: Work backwards from Business Security Team and Builder customers to define the strategy for non-Builder Tools detections and specialized SBS detections.
• Team Building: Hire and develop engineers who are excited about the problem space, mentoring them into detection specialists.
• AI-Driven Detection: Apply AI to accelerate detection development, moving from finding to production capability faster than manual rule-writing allows.
• Gap Analysis: Identify coverage gaps in Amazon's detection landscape and prioritize based on exploitability and business impact to customers.
• Actionable Outcomes: Deliver detection capabilities that produce actionable findings at scale—not reports that sit unread. Review findings before they reach builders to ensure precision, because a false positive spends a customer's trust.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with penetration testing, vulnerability intelligence, and AI tooling teams within Adversarial Engineering to create a detection-to-validation feedback loop.
• Representation: Represent the team's work in business reviews, planning, and cross-org prioritization discussions.

A Day in the Life

One day you are reviewing a Detection Engineer's approach to identifying a novel deserialization pattern across SBS services and helping them scope the blast radius. The next you are in a planning session with penetration testers, turning their manual findings into AI-assisted detections that run continuously. You spend time with SBS Business Security Teams understanding the risks they carry, then working backwards to what your team should build next quarter, informed by coverage gap analysis and intelligence from the Vulnerability Intel team.

When a new attack technique emerges, your team determines whether Amazon has exposure and builds the capability to find it at scale—in days rather than quarters—because AI compresses the distance between an idea and a working detection.

Qualifications and Requirements

• Experience: A minimum of 5 years managing and developing engineering teams, coupled with 5+ years of progressive work within a software security environment.
• Education: A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a closely related field. A Master's degree is preferred.
• Technical Expertise: Deep knowledge of web services security, cryptography, network security protocols, and OS security. Proven experience applying threat modeling and risk identification techniques.
• Certifications (Preferred): Information security professional credentials such as SANS GIAC or CISSP.

Compensation and Benefits

The base salary range for this New York-based position is $192,600 to $260,500 USD annually. Total compensation includes sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs), with final figures determined by experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon provides comprehensive benefits, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave.

Application Strategy for Candidates

Securing a senior leadership role at Amazon requires a highly targeted approach. Candidates should prominently highlight specific instances where they transitioned manual security processes into AI-assisted or automated frameworks. Given the emphasis on building bespoke detection capabilities, your resume must detail measurable security outcomes—demonstrate how your previous detections reduced exploitable exposure and produced actionable findings at scale.

Be prepared to discuss your philosophy on false positive management. Familiarize yourself with the latest advancements in AI-driven vulnerability detection and be ready to discuss how you would apply these technologies to compress the timeline between an emerging attack technique and a working production detection. Reviewing current threat modeling methodologies and understanding how to scope blast radii across complex service architectures will be critical for the interview process.

Amazon Security values diverse experiences and non-traditional career paths. Even if you do not meet every qualification listed, the organization encourages candidates to apply. If you have the fundamental leadership and technical acumen to define what a team builds from the ground up, this role offers an exceptional platform to impact security standards across Amazon's estate.