AWS Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) embeds AI engineers directly inside strategic enterprise customers to design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems. Security is the critical enabler. We are looking for a Sr. Manager, Security Engineering to build and lead the FDE security team that protects production AI systems deployed in customer environments worldwide.
You will own the security delivery model for FDE: standing up the team, defining how security engineers embed with FDE delivery pods, and ensuring every customer engagement meets AWS and customer security standards without slowing delivery velocity. You are responsible for security outcomes across all active FDE programs simultaneously. You set the operating cadence, staffing model, and escalation paths that keep security moving at the speed of FDE: weeks, not quarters.
You lead a team of senior and principal security engineers while staying close enough to the technical work to make critical security decisions, unblock customer escalations, and earn the trust of customer CISOs. You build the team, develop the people, and own the results.
This position requires that the candidate selected be a US Citizen.
Key job responsibilities
- Build, develop, and lead a team of security engineers embedded across FDE customer engagements; own performance management, career development, and retention for a high-performing, geographically distributed security team
- Define and operate the FDE security delivery model: how security engineers staff to pods, scope engagements, conduct reviews, and hand off to customers; create the mechanisms that ensure consistent security outcomes at scale
- Own security delivery across multiple concurrent customer programs; prioritize security resources against the FDE engagement portfolio, resolve cross-engagement conflicts, and drive closure on security blockers impeding production deployments
- Partner with FDE delivery leadership, AWS Security, and service teams to align security strategy with FDE's business objectives; represent security in FDE leadership forums and influence technical direction across organizational boundaries
- Make high-judgment security risk decisions for FDE's most complex customer environments; serve as the escalation point for security architectural trade-offs that require balancing customer requirements, delivery timelines, and AWS standards
- Engage directly with customer security leadership (CISOs, security VPs) to establish trust, align on security expectations, and resolve escalations that threaten customer relationships or production timelines
- Drive the FDE security roadmap: identify capability gaps, prioritize investments in tooling, automation, and reusable security patterns, and ensure the team builds assets that scale the practice beyond individual engagements
- Requires up to 25% travel
A day in the life
You start the morning in a standup with your security engineers embedded across three active FDE engagements, triaging a guardrail bypass finding from one pod and reprioritizing security review coverage for a new financial services customer onboarding this week. Mid-morning you're in a 1:1 with a senior security engineer working through their promotion narrative. Before lunch you join a call with a customer CISO who needs assurance on data isolation controls before greenlighting production. In the afternoon you're reviewing the team's quarterly security metrics with FDE delivery leadership, then closing out the day interviewing a principal security engineer candidate. You balance people, delivery, and strategy every day.
About the team
AWS Forward Deployed Engineering embeds AI engineers directly inside strategic enterprise customers to build production AI systems. AWS invested $1B in this initiative. We move at the speed of the customer: demonstrating ROI in weeks, not quarters. We are customer-obsessed. We lead customers toward outcomes, build together, and leave behind scalable patterns. Security is our enabling function: without it, nothing goes to production. Our culture is people-first, anti-burnout, bold, and engineering-excellence-driven.
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