Senior Software Engineer, AppSTAR COMPASS

Amazon is hiring a Senior Software Engineer, AppSTAR COMPASS in Austin, United States. It pays $168k-$227k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Amazon.

Level's read on this job

Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this software engineer role: the job is building AI systems.
The listed pay starts close to the typical software engineer posting on Level.
Tools and skills the posting cites include Python, LLM and system architecture.
Level classifies it as a senior role.
Level lists 20,000+ other open roles at Amazon.

AI in this role

Design and build an automated LLM-powered security review and evaluation platform for high-volume code changes.

PythonLLM

system-architecturesecurityagentic-systemsdistributed-systems

Be a founding engineer on a brand-new team building security review for the LLM age. You'll design and write the platform that evaluates every code change tens of thousands of engineers ship, and clears the vast majority without a human ever touching it.

Security review has always been a bottleneck. A developer ships a change, waits for someone to look at it, and the security team drowns in a queue it can never fully clear. We're ending that tradeoff. Our engine evaluates changes as they happen, decides how much scrutiny each one actually needs, and handles the common case automatically with no wait for the developer and no queue for the reviewer.

The team is funded and forming now, and the first engineers will set the architecture. That means real design ownership, not a codebase you inherit, and experienced security engineers backing you with the risk expertise so you build against what actually matters. If you want to work on agentic systems where the correctness bar is high and the impact is measurable, this is the seat.

Set the architecture for a greenfield platform, not maintain someone else's
Build agentic and automated evaluation running continuously at very high volume
Ship something measurable: fewer manual reviews, faster releases, no added burden on developers

Key job responsibilities
- Design and build the core of an event-driven platform that evaluates code changes for security risk, routes the small fraction needing human attention, and clears the rest automatically.
- Own significant technical decisions end to end: data flow, evaluation pipeline, service boundaries, storage, and the tradeoffs behind each one.
- Build and tune the automated evaluation layers, including agentic checks, and the mechanisms that keep their decisions accurate over time.
- Partner closely with the security team that defines how risk is evaluated, turning their criteria into production code that runs reliably at scale.
- Work directly with the security engineers who handle escalated changes, building the queues, context, and tooling that make their reviews fast.
- Build the developer-facing experience: clear, trustworthy visibility into what was evaluated, what happened, and why, with as close to zero required action as possible.
- Negotiate and implement the integrations with adjacent platform and telemetry teams the system depends on.
- Raise the engineering bar on a new team: code review, design review, testing strategy, operational readiness, and on-call fundamentals from the start.
- Mentor engineers and help interview and grow the team as it scales.

A day in the life
You'll spend most of your time designing and writing code on a system that doesn't exist yet: how an event moves through the pipeline, where automated checks fire, what happens when confidence drops. You'll pair with security engineers to pressure-test whether your evaluation logic catches what it should. Some days you're in a design review defending a boundary decision, or debugging why a class of change is getting routed wrong at volume. Early on you'll help shape the roadmap and interview the engineers who join next.

About the team
We decide how security attention gets spent. Our customers are the engineers shipping code every day and the security engineers reviewing it, and both are paying a tax we think is unnecessary. Our mission is to remove it: make security assurance automatic, proportional to real risk, and visible to the people it protects. We're small, new, and unusually close to the outcome. We care more about getting the decision right than about being the ones who make it, and we'd rather encode expertise into a mechanism than hoard it.

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. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.

Why Amazon Security?
At Amazon, security is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for security across all of Amazon’s products and services. We offer talented security professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores.

Inclusive Team Culture
In Amazon Security, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest security challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices.

Training & Career Growth
We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, training, and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional.

Work/Life Balance
We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why 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

- 5+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
- 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience
- 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
- Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team

Preferred qualifications

- 5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

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, TX, Austin - 168,100.00 - 227,400.00 USD annually

How we rate this

Senior Software Engineer, AppSTAR COMPASS at Amazon rates 85 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Senior Software Engineer, AppSTAR COMPASS is an open job at Amazon.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The listed salary is $168k-$227k a year.
The role is based in US, TX, Austin.
The job was posted on August 18, 2026.
Seniority: senior.
Applications are handled by Amazon. Apply on Amazon

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

System ArchitectureSecurityAgentic SystemsDistributed SystemsPythonLLM

Also common in software engineer jobs at this level

Python C++Machine learning AWS AI agents Kubernetes

Pay

This job starts at: $168k
Typical software engineer job: $167k

This posting starts close to the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs

Questions you could be asked

Tell me about a project where system architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where security was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where agentic systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Walk me through how you've used Python in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: System Architecture, Security, Agentic Systems, Distributed Systems, and Python. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

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