Amazon CISO’s amazing career journey: from Air Force to AWS, with a side of car racing

If you ask Amazon CISO CJ Moses what he's been up to at Amazon for the past 17 years, his answer might just be ‘you name it.’

Moses, who has been at Amazon since 2007, has filled many roles not only within the company over the past 17 years, but also outside of it. In his current position as CISO and VP of security engineering, he is responsible for overseeing the success of CISOs across Amazon business lines and raising the “security bar” appropriately for those different businesses.

“By sharing the Amazon name, the trust our customers place in us needs to stay…regardless of what the business is,” Moses said. “But the types of security and how we implement it and the literal written bar and requirements are different from business to business.”

You’re probably wondering how I got here. IT Brew caught up with Moses at the 2025 AWS re:Inforce conference in Pennsylvania to learn more about his career trajectory. In 1997, he was working as a computer crime investigator for the Air Force, where he opted in to a 45-day temporary assignment at the FBI headquarters. Those 45 days turned into four years, in an investigation now known as Moonlight Maze, a code name referring to a cyber espionage campaign against the US in the late 1990s.

“It’s one of the investigations that’s actually in the Spy Museum right now,” Moses said.

Following the assignment, Moses joined the FBI full time, which at the time was on the hunt for more processing power.

“This was before the term ‘Big Data’ even existed and we had big data,” Moses said. “So, we looked at lots of technology providers.”

When AWS launched Elastic Compute Cloud, aka EC2, Moses and others entered discussions with the cloud giant on how the FBI could use the offering to support its missions. After more than six months of discussions, Moses ultimately left the FBI and joined the tech giant to help build out what it was seeking in 2007.

Full circle moment. After landing at AWS, Moses worked alongside current CSO Stephen Schmidt and VP and distinguished engineer Eric Brandwine, jumpstarting AWS’s East Coast office and helping to launch Virtual Private Cloud. Moses, who later became AWS’s deputy CISO and general manager of AWS government cloud, also started AWS’s intelligence community cloud offering.

“Essentially, that was when I actually did go full circle from having the requirements and the need to provide the same community I came from with the technology that we were after,” Moses said.

Looking inward. Years later, after a brief stint as the temporary CISO of Amazon’s retail business, Moses said the company as a whole had realized that its “security organizations” operated differently across the organization.

“Differently isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we knew that there could be efficiencies and increases in efficacy if we had the ability to see across all our different businesses,” Moses said.

The discovery led Moses to create what would later become the starting framework for Amazon’s security organization, which would focus on protecting Amazon’s employees, customers, systems, and data. The new framework prompted a reorganization of the company; Moses became AWS’s CISO and CISO roles were established for Amazon stores and retail business.

“Obviously AWS security being the largest and most established and mature one, we actually help the others to establish a more formal and mature offering from a security perspective, as well as learn from them at the same time,” he said.

Hobby lore. When Moses isn’t working or spending time with his family—which includes his wife, daughter, four rescue dogs, and rabbit—he can be found in his Audi R8 LMS GT2 on the race track. Moses has been an avid race car driver since 2005. Prior to that, he participated in various high performance driving events.

“I used to race a lot more,” Moses said. “Obviously, the job’s pretty demanding.”

In an 2019 interview with GT World Challenge America, Moses drew several comparisons between life on the track and his day job at AWS, where he encourages staffers to be “tactically impatient, yet strategically patient.”

“You can’t win the race if you wreck in the first turn, but you also can’t win if you never get off the starting line.”