Principal Security Operations Engineer

Axon

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 169,000 - 311,000

Full time

8 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

401K match

Discretionary PTO

Parental leave

Job summary

Axon seeks a Principal Security Operations Engineer to design secure, scalable, cloud-native infrastructure across Kubernetes, AWS, and Azure. You will lead security tooling, guardrails in CI/CD, and partner with SRE and platform teams to raise engineering standards.

You will mentor engineers, drive incident response improvements, and advance security observability with telemetry, logging, and alerting. A focus on reducing toil while maintaining strict security controls is key.

Qualifications

10+ years of experience in security engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure, SRE, or related roles.
Deep Kubernetes expertise with production-scale experience.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the technical strategy for securing Axon’s cloud-native infrastructure, focusing on Kubernetes, containers, and AWS/Azure.
Lead architectural reviews and improve Kubernetes platforms to close security and reliability gaps.
Design and implement security guardrails across CI/CD and developer workflows to minimize friction while boosting security.

Skills

Kubernetes

Security engineering

Cloud security

AWS/Azure

CI/CD

Automation

Go/Python

Terraform

PKI

Leadership

Tools

Terraform

Helm

GitOps

Job description

Join Axon and be a Force for Good.

At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We’re explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other. Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter.

Job Description - Principal Security Operations Engineer

Our mission is to protect life

We’re out to make the world a safer place by solving big problems and taking on the public safety challenges of our time. From our company’s inception building the TASER device to a full suite of hardware and software solutions, we are focused on providing police agencies with state-of-the-art devices and services they need to successfully serve and protect us. In the next few years, we’re going to eliminate the burden of paperwork in policing, so officers can increase the time they spend building relationships and serving in their communities. We’ll put video at the heart of police records so our justice system can get to the truth faster. And we won't stop innovating until the bullet is rendered obsolete. It’s a big mission, but it’s one we’ll pursue relentlessly every single day.

Your Impact

As a Principal Security Operations Engineer, you will play a key role in building secure, reliable, and developer-friendly infrastructure that enables teams to move quickly without compromising security. You will solve complex technical challenges, improve system reliability through automation, and partner closely with engineering teams to scale security capabilities across the organization. In this role, you will design and develop security tools that support vulnerability management and secure software delivery pipelines, integrating security seamlessly into developer workflows. Your work will help reduce friction for developers while ensuring high standards for security, reliability, and operational efficiency across mission-critical systems.

Location:

Seattle, WA, Scottsdale, AZ, Boston, MA, Atlanta, GA, San Francisco, CA

Direct Reports:

None

Your Day-to-Day

Lead the review, design, and continuous improvement of Axon’s Kubernetes platforms with platform teams to strengthen architecture, security, resilience, and operational practices across existing and new environments.
Drive the evolution of security application delivery at Axon, refactoring how security services are built, deployed, and operated while establishing automated security controls and guardrails across CI/CD pipelines.
Architect, provision, and secure AWS and Azure infrastructure supporting critical security platforms and services, leveraging infrastructure-as-code, automation, and cloud-native best practices.
Partner with developers, SRE, and platform engineering teams to influence architecture and ensure security is embedded into infrastructure, services, and developer workflows by design.
Provide deep technical leadership during complex security and infrastructure incidents, driving root cause analysis, durable remediation, and engineering improvements that prevent recurrence.
Advance security observability across cloud and Kubernetes environments through improved telemetry, logging, metrics, detection, and actionable alerting.
Identify opportunities to eliminate operational toil by building and improving internal security tooling, automation, runbooks, and self-service capabilities.
Establish technical standards and best practices for operating security platforms at scale, while mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across teams.
Experience designing or operating PKI and certificate management systems at scale is a plus.

What you’ll Do

Define and drive the technical strategy for securing Axon’s cloud-native infrastructure, with a strong focus on Kubernetes, containerized workloads, and AWS/Azure environments.
Lead architectural reviews and improvements across Axon’s Kubernetes platforms, identifying security, reliability, and operational gaps and partnering with platform teams to implement scalable solutions.
Modernize how security applications are built, deployed, and operated at Axon, improving deployment architecture, automation, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code to create secure, repeatable, and resilient delivery patterns.
Design and implement security guardrails and automated controls across CI/CD and developer workflows, enabling engineering teams to move quickly while identifying and addressing security risks early.
Architect and provision secure, highly available AWS and Azure infrastructure for critical security services using infrastructure-as-code and cloud-native technologies.
Establish and improve security standards for Kubernetes and container ecosystems, including cluster hardening, workload security, RBAC, network controls, admission policies, image security, and runtime protection.
Provide technical leadership for complex security and infrastructure challenges, including high-impact incidents, architecture decisions, and cross-platform security initiatives.
Partner with SRE, Platform Engineering, Product Security, and development teams to influence technical direction and embed security into platform architecture and engineering practices.
Drive improvements in security observability, automation, and operational resilience while reducing manual processes and engineering toil.
Mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, and raise the technical bar for building and operating security platforms across Axon.
Apply PKI and certificate management expertise where applicable to strengthen security architecture and platform capabilities.

what you’ll bring

10+ years of experience in security engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure, SRE, or related roles, with demonstrated technical leadership across large-scale environments.
Expert-level Kubernetes experience, with deep hands-on knowledge of cluster architecture, provisioning, upgrades, networking, RBAC, policy enforcement, workload security, and operating production Kubernetes environments at scale.
Strong experience reviewing and improving existing Kubernetes platforms, identifying architectural and security gaps, and driving improvements across multiple engineering teams.
Deep expertise in AWS and/or Azure, including designing, provisioning, securing, and operating highly available cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code.
Strong software engineering and automation skills, with proficiency in languages such as Go, Python, or similar, and experience building production-grade internal platforms, services, and security tooling.
Extensive experience designing and improving CI/CD and application deployment architectures, including refactoring legacy deployment patterns into secure, automated, repeatable, and scalable solutions.
Deep understanding of container security and container registries such as ECR and ACR, including image lifecycle, vulnerability scanning, access controls, and supply chain security.
Strong knowledge of cloud-native security architecture, including network security, secrets management, workload identity, policy enforcement, and runtime protection.
Experience implementing security guardrails and automated controls that improve security while minimizing friction for developers.
Strong infrastructure-as-code experience with technologies such as Terraform, Helm, GitOps, or similar tooling.
Proven ability to troubleshoot complex distributed systems and lead technical response to high-impact security, infrastructure, and production incidents.
Experience designing security observability capabilities across cloud and Kubernetes environments, including logging, metrics, detection, and actionable alerting.
Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership across organizational boundaries, influence architecture and engineering direction, and drive complex initiatives without requiring direct authority.
Ability to mentor senior engineers, establish engineering standards, and raise the technical bar across security, platform, and infrastructure teams.
Strong communication skills with the ability to translate complex security and infrastructure challenges into clear technical direction and actionable engineering plans.
Experience with PKI, certificate management, or machine identity at scale is a plus.
US Citizenship.

Benefits that benefit you

Competitive salary and 401K with employer match
Discretionary paid time off
Robust parental leave policy
An award-winning office/working environment
Ride along with real police officers in real life situations, see them use technology, get inspired
And more...

Axon is a total compensation company, meaning compensation is made up of base pay, bonus, and stock awards. The actual base pay is dependent upon many factors, such as: level, function, training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs, geographic market, and often a combination of all these factors. Our benefits offer an array of options to help support you physically, financially and emotionally through the big milestones and in your everyday life. To see more details on our benefits offerings please visit https://www.axon.com/careers.

Base Pay Range $168,750 - $270,000 USD

Base Pay Range $194,062 - $310,500 USD

Base Pay Range $168,750 - $270,000 USD

We collect personal information from applicants to evaluate candidates for employment. You may request access, deletion, or exercise other CCPA rights at axongreenhousesupport@axon.com or via our Axon Privacy Web Form. For more information, please see the Your California Privacy Rights section of our Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice.

Axon’s mission is to Protect Life and is committed to the well-being and safety of its employees as well as Axon’s impact on the environment. All Axon employees must be aware of and committed to the appropriate environmental, health, and safety regulations, policies, and procedures. Axon employees are empowered to report safety concerns as they arise and activities potentially impacting the environment.

We are an equal opportunity employer that promotes justice, advances equity and values diversity and fosters inclusion. We’re committed to hiring the best talent — regardless of race, creed, color, ancestry, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances — and empowering all of our employees so they can do their best work. If you have a disability or special need that requires assistance or accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email recruitingops@axon.com. Please note that this email address is for accommodation purposes only. Axon will not respond to inquiries for other purposes.

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