Sr. Applied Scientist, Cedar Authorization

Sr. Applied Scientist, Cedar Authorization

Are you passionate about authorization, programming languages, formal verification, program analysis, constraint‑solving, and/or theorem proving applied to real‑world problems? Do you want to shape the future of an open‑source authorization language that is becoming an industry standard? If so, we have an exciting opportunity for you.

Cedar is an open‑source policy language and evaluation engine for authorization used across AWS services such as Amazon Verified Permissions and AWS Systems Manager. Cedar recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project, and we are looking for an Applied Scientist to advance Cedar's adoption, maturity, and community presence across the cloud‑native ecosystem.

• Drive the design and development of Cedar's integration into cloud‑native authorization environments, including Kubernetes and other CNCF ecosystem projects.
• Advance Cedar's formal verification, SMT‑based analysis, and policy validation capabilities to raise the bar for authorization assurance.
• Interact with various teams to understand their security, authorization, and policy requirements.
• Apply acquired knowledge to build tools that find problems, or demonstrate the absence of security/safety issues in authorization policies and systems.
• Implement these tools through SAT, SMT, and concepts from programming languages, theorem proving, formal verification, and constraint solving.
• Create software prototypes to verify and validate devised solutions; integrate prototypes into production systems using standard software development tools and methodologies.
• Contribute to Cedar's open‑source codebase as a maintainer, driving code quality, review standards, and technical direction.

• Represent Cedar and AWS at technical conferences, including CNCF events such as Kube Con, and advocate for Cedar adoption across the cloud‑native community.
• Present and defend company‑wide technical decisions to the internal technical community and represent the company effectively at technical conferences.
• Serve as a functional thought leader, sought after for key technical decisions and able to sell ideas to executive‑level decision makers.
• Mentor and train the research scientist community on complex technical issues.
• Collaborate with the open‑source community to advance Cedar's CNCF project maturity (Sandbox → Incubation → Graduated).
• Build and maintain relationships with cloud‑native developers, contributors, and organizations to drive Cedar adoption and gather feedback.

You will be working on cutting‑edge technology at the intersection of formal methods, automated reasoning, authorization, and cloud‑native systems. You will collaborate with fellow applied scientists and engineers to solve challenging problems that provide value to customers by improving the security and usability of authorization. You will engage with the open‑source community, contribute to Cedar's CNCF journey, and have an opportunity to publish your work and present at leading industry conferences.

The Cedar team builds and maintains Cedar, an open‑source policy language and evaluation engine for authorization. Cedar is designed to be ergonomic, fast, and analyzable, backed by automated reasoning and formal verification. Cedar is used across multiple AWS services and has joined the CNCF as a Sandbox project, with the goal of becoming a Graduated project and an industry standard for authorization.

The team works at the intersection of programming languages, formal methods, and cloud‑native infrastructure.

• PhD or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience.
• Experience programming in Java, C++, Python, Rust, Go, or a related language.
• Experience in algorithms and data structures, parsing, numerical optimization, data mining, parallel and distributed computing, or high‑performance computing.
• Experience with patents or publications at top‑tier peer‑reviewed conferences or journals.

• 5+ years of industry or academic research experience.
• Experience in…