Principal Security Operations Engineer

1. Job Overview:

Axon — Join Axon and be a Force for Good.

Axon’s mission is to Protect Life. We are explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with an ecosystem of devices and cloud software. From building the TASER device to a full suite of hardware and software solutions, Axon focuses on providing police agencies with state-of-the-art devices and services to help them serve and protect communities. In the coming years Axon plans to reduce paperwork burdens in policing, put video at the heart of police records to help the justice system get to the truth faster, and continue innovating to pursue its mission relentlessly.

Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Employees take ownership and drive real change, constantly growing while working for a mission that matters at a company where they matter. Axon describes its office/working environment as award-winning and notes opportunities such as ride-alongs with real police officers to see technology in real situations.

Role purpose: 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. You will design and develop security tools that support vulnerability management and secure software delivery pipelines, integrating security seamlessly into developer workflows to reduce friction for developers while ensuring high standards for security, reliability, and operational efficiency across mission-critical systems.

2. Key Responsibilities:

• 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.
• 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.

3. Required Qualifications:

• Education degrees and qualifications: Not specified in the job posting.

4. Required Skills:

• 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.
• US Citizenship.

5. Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing or operating PKI and certificate management systems at scale is a plus.
• Experience with PKI, certificate management, or machine identity at scale is a plus.

6. Experience Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in security engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure, SRE, or related roles.

7. Additional Job Information:

• Employment type: Full-time.
• Work mode: On-site (locations provided below and Axon references offices and an award-winning office/working environment).
• Notice period: Not specified in the job posting.
• Employer-provided locations: Seattle, WA; Scottsdale, AZ; Boston, MA; Atlanta, GA; San Francisco, CA; and Atlanta, GA, Fulton County, GA; Georgia, United States (locations listed in the posting).
• Application instructions and contact information: If you require accommodation during the application or recruiting process, email recruitingops@axon.com. For CCPA or applicant privacy rights requests, contact axongreenhousesupport@axon.com or use the Axon Privacy Web Form. Axon notes all legitimate job openings are listed on its official careers page. Axon also warns about phishing and instructs reporting suspicious outreach to recruitingops@axon.com.

• Benefits highlights listed in the posting: competitive salary and 401K with employer match, discretionary paid time off, robust parental leave policy, award-winning office/working environment, ride-alongs with police officers, and more. Axon states it is a total compensation company (base pay, bonus, and stock awards) and provides base pay ranges in the posting.