[Hiring] Penetration Tester @Amazon

Role Description

Do you enjoy finding security issues? Do you enjoy protecting customers at scale? On the AWS Penetration Testing team, you will help deliver continuous, signal driven adversarial testing of AWS production services. You will work on scoped security problems, learn to build on the output of GenAI security tools and take it where those tools cannot reach, and grow your ability to find issues that automation misses.

Our team runs a model of security testing that never stops. Automation and GenAI tools establish a baseline, and we extend past it by turning raw findings into demonstrated exploits and abuse cases that need human judgment and service context. As a Security Engineer I, you will take on defined testing work within the team, apply established methodologies and runbooks, and consult senior engineers as you build judgment around ambiguity. You will learn from early mistakes and rarely repeat them.

We are looking for a Security Engineer to assess our services against a high security bar. You will work closely with teammates who guide your growth. Over time you will expand the range of services you can test on your own.

Key job responsibilities

• Perform adversarial testing of AWS production services on scoped work, using established team methodologies and guidance from senior engineers.
• Build on the findings of GenAI security tools and automation, combining candidate weaknesses into demonstrated exploits rather than forwarding raw alerts as conclusions.
• Manually audit the source code of web services and software authored in house by Amazon, focusing on defined components and known risk areas that tools cover poorly.
• Follow a suspected flaw where it leads within your scope, and escalate to senior engineers when it reaches across a service boundary.
• Write proof of concept code that demonstrates provable, reproducible impact for the issues you identify.
• Explain each finding in written and verbal form, covering what is wrong, why it matters, and what to do about it, and help validate that fixes work.
• Own the tickets you cut and drive them toward a validated fix, treating "resolved" as unproven until you confirm it.
• Feed the limitations you find back to GenAI tool owners so the tooling improves and the human only frontier narrows.
• Contribute to the team's runbooks, tools, and automation, and help automate any manual technique the team performs more than twice.
• Act on the signals that set the team's targets, including change signals, tool output, bug bounty reports, and threat models, and apply judgment about when to work independently and when to seek guidance.

Qualifications

• Knowledge of one or more scripting languages (e.g., Python, Ruby, Perl).
• Knowledge of security fundamentals such as common vulnerability classes, threat modeling, and secure coding, gained through self teaching, a skills program, formal education, or equivalent experience.
• Ability to communicate security risk for low complexity problems in written and verbal form.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field (preferred).
• Hands on experience with penetration testing, CTFs, bug bounties, or security research (preferred).
• Exposure to cloud environments (AWS or similar) and web application security (preferred).
• Experience writing automation or tooling to reduce manual effort (preferred).

Benefits

• Comprehensive 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.