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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for AWS Product Security Engineer

💰 $140,000 - $220,000

SecurityCloudAWSProduct SecurityDevSecOps

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced AWS Product Security Engineer to embed security into the full product lifecycle for cloud-native applications running on AWS. This role partners with product and engineering teams to design, validate, and operate secure systems, drive secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) improvements, and operationalize threat detection and response in production. The ideal candidate has hands-on AWS experience (IAM, KMS, VPC, EKS/ECS, Lambda), strong application security and cloud infrastructure security expertise, and a demonstrated ability to translate security risk into prioritized, actionable remediation that product teams can implement.

Key search terms: AWS Product Security Engineer, cloud security engineer, product security, DevSecOps, secure SDLC, AWS security, application security, container security, threat modeling.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Cloud Security Engineer with hands-on AWS experience
  • Application/Product Security Engineer or AppSec Engineer
  • DevOps/Platform Engineer with security focus and/or DevSecOps experience

Advancement To:

  • Senior / Principal Product Security Engineer
  • Security Engineering Manager or Lead, Product Security
  • Director of Product Security or Head of Cloud Security

Lateral Moves:

  • Security Architect (Cloud / Application)
  • DevSecOps Engineer / Platform Security Engineer
  • Incident Response / Threat Hunting Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead product-integrated threat modeling workshops and attack-surface analysis for new and existing AWS-native features and services, translating the output into prioritized remediation plans and security requirements that engineering teams can implement.
  • Design, deploy, and maintain AWS-native security controls (IAM least-privilege policies, KMS key management, VPC network segmentation, Security Groups, NACLs) to reduce blast radius and enforce strong isolation across multi-tenant and microservice architectures.
  • Drive secure design reviews and architecture reviews for new product initiatives, providing prescriptive guidance on secure patterns for serverless (Lambda), containers (EKS/ECS), and managed services (RDS, S3, DynamoDB) to ensure compliance with security policies and regulatory requirements.
  • Build and operationalize automated security gates in CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI) to enforce SAST, DAST, SCA scans, infrastructure-as-code static analysis (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK) and prevent insecure code and misconfigurations from reaching production.
  • Own vulnerability management for product infrastructure and codebases: ingest scan results (Snyk, Dependabot, Trivy, AWS Inspector), triage findings, coordinate risk-based remediation with product teams, and maintain SLA-driven remediation programs.
  • Implement runtime security and monitoring (GuardDuty, Security Hub, Inspector, Falco, runtime EKS security) and define detection engineering use cases with meaningful alerts, runbooks, and escalation paths to reduce mean time to detect and respond (MTTD/MTTR).
  • Collaborate with product managers and engineering leads to embed security requirements (privacy, data protection, encryption, key lifecycle) into product roadmaps and definition-of-done criteria, ensuring alignment with business priorities.
  • Develop, maintain, and evolve the secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC) playbook, providing checklists, templates, and automated tooling to help engineering teams ship secure code faster.
  • Conduct code reviews and application security assessments (manual and automated), identifying high-risk code patterns (auth, authorization, cryptography, deserialization, injection) and recommending secure fixes and test coverage.
  • Create and maintain threat models, security architecture diagrams, and design documentation that are integrated into product and platform repositories for traceability and audit readiness.
  • Lead and participate in incident response for product security incidents (data exposures, unauthorized access, privilege escalation), performing root cause analysis and driving permanent mitigations and post-incident improvements.
  • Implement secrets management patterns (AWS Secrets Manager, Parameter Store, HashiCorp Vault) and enforce best practices for credentials lifecycle, rotation, and access auditing in CI/CD and runtime environments.
  • Define and track security KPIs and metrics for product security posture (vulnerability backlog, time-to-remediate, number of findings per release, privilege violations) and report trends to engineering leadership and stakeholders.
  • Integrate and tune cloud-native security services (AWS Config, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Security Hub, VPC Flow Logs) into centralized monitoring and analytics platforms for comprehensive coverage and compliance reporting.
  • Design and champion container and orchestration security standards: image scanning, runtime policies, Pod Security Standards, RBAC best practices for EKS, and secure supply chain controls for container registries.
  • Automate remediation and policy enforcement using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK) and orchestration tools to reduce manual toil and ensure repeatable secure deployments.
  • Provide developer-facing security training, office hours, and enablement content to increase security awareness, improve secure coding practices, and reduce recurring security defects in product code.
  • Maintain and evolve threat intelligence use cases and MITRE ATT&CK mappings tailored to the product environment to make detection and response more precise and actionable.
  • Support compliance and audit readiness (SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS when applicable) by producing evidence, participating in control design, and helping product teams meet control requirements.
  • Run Red Team / Purple Team style exercises or sponsor third-party penetration tests focused on product features and cloud infrastructure, convert findings into prioritized action items, and track closure.
  • Mentor and coach junior product security engineers and embed security champions across product teams to scale security expertise and adoption.

Secondary Functions

  • Partner with QA and SRE teams to include security test cases in staging and pre-production environments and validate mitigations prior to release.
  • Support cross-functional security initiatives such as identity modernization, data classification, and encryption-at-rest/in-transit programs.
  • Maintain and improve security tooling integrations, APIs, and dashboards to present actionable security insights to product engineering teams.
  • Contribute to the organization's security policy and standards definition based on product and cloud architecture learnings and industry best practices.
  • Assist in vendor risk evaluations for third-party services and open-source dependencies used by product teams, and recommend safer alternatives where necessary.
  • Provide ad-hoc security consultation during incident escalations, product launches, high-risk configuration changes, and mergers & acquisitions technical due diligence.
  • Collaborate with legal and privacy teams to operationalize data protection requirements within product implementations and ensure alignment with contractual obligations.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Deep AWS security expertise: IAM, STS, KMS, CloudTrail, Config, GuardDuty, Security Hub, Inspector, WAF, Shield, VPC, S3, RDS.
  • Secure architecture and design: threat modeling, secure design reviews, attacker surface reduction for cloud-native applications.
  • Infrastructure as Code and policy-as-code: Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Open Policy Agent (OPA), Sentinel.
  • Container and orchestration security: Docker image hardening, EKS/ECS best practices, Pod Security Standards, runtime protections (Falco, eBPF).
  • CI/CD and developer tooling security: integrating SAST, DAST, SCA, and secrets scanning into pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab).
  • Application security testing and tooling: SAST (e.g., Semgrep, Checkmarx), DAST (e.g., OWASP ZAP, Burp), dependency scanning (Snyk, Dependabot).
  • Vulnerability management and remediation: patching strategies, prioritization frameworks, and automation for vulnerability lifecycles.
  • Cryptography basics and key management: encryption-at-rest/in-transit, KMS usage patterns, certificate lifecycle management.
  • Programming and scripting: Python, Go, or similar for automation, tooling, and proof-of-concept exploit development.
  • Logging, monitoring and detection engineering: CloudWatch, ELK, Splunk, SIEM integrations and building reliable detections and runbooks.
  • Secrets management and identity federation: AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, SAML/OIDC, role-based access controls and least-privilege design.
  • Compliance and audit readiness: experience supporting SOC2, ISO27001, PCI-DSS or similar frameworks in cloud product contexts.
  • Penetration testing and adversary emulation frameworks (MITRE ATT&CK), experience consuming pen test results and translating them to engineering work.
  • Automation and scripting for security orchestration: Lambda functions, Step Functions, and tooling to automate detection/remediation workflows.

Soft Skills

  • Strong communicator who can translate complex security risks into clear, business-aligned recommendations for product and engineering stakeholders.
  • Proven collaborator and influencer who can work across product, engineering, SRE, QA, legal, and compliance teams to drive security outcomes.
  • Pragmatic risk manager who balances speed-to-market with appropriate security controls and can prioritize remediation based on business impact.
  • Problem-solver with proactive mindset who anticipates threats and implements preventive controls and detection capabilities.
  • Empathetic educator and mentor who enables engineers through training, documentation, and hands-on pairing rather than blocking progress.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Security, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, or a related technical field, or relevant professional certifications (CISSP, AWS Certified Security – Specialty, OSCP).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science or Software Engineering
  • Information Security / Cybersecurity
  • Cloud Computing / Distributed Systems
  • Information Systems / Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 4–8+ years in security engineering or product security roles; 6+ years preferred for senior levels.

Preferred:

  • 3+ years of hands-on experience securing AWS environments and cloud-native applications.
  • Demonstrated experience partnering with product teams to embed security into SDLC, implementing CI/CD security gates, and owning vulnerability lifecycle management.
  • Experience with containers and orchestration security (Kubernetes/EKS), infrastructure-as-code, and automating security controls and remediation.
  • Track record of building detection engineering capabilities, responding to incidents, and running threat modeling or adversary emulation exercises.
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