In 2024, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) formally codified what many in product security have long practiced: security must be built in, not bolted on. The agency’s Secure-by-Design directive urges software vendors and engineering teams to treat security as a foundational obligation, not an optional enhancement. Yet for many organizations, the shift remains surface-level. The tools are changing. The workflows are not.
For Amrit Pal Singh, product security is not a final gate; it is the architectural scaffolding beneath everything modern software relies on. An experienced Product Security Engineer at Amazon, his work spans the secure design of infrastructure, developer tooling, and platform services at scale. With a background that includes Adobe, Deloitte, and PayPal, Singh brings a rare blend of enterprise discipline and platform-native fluency. Across more than a decade in application and cloud security, his focus has never been reactive protection. It has always been proactive design. “Security only scales when it behaves like part of the product,” he says. “If it feels external, it will be treated as optional.”
Review Cycles Cannot Scale with Complexity
Traditional security models were built for a different time—when monoliths ruled, release cycles were quarterly, and security teams had time to manually review every change. Today, security failures are rarely novel zero-days. Today’s reality is radically different. Software is deployed continuously, across hundreds of microservices, in ephemeral environments where infrastructure is declarative and configuration is code. Under these conditions, security checklists become bottlenecks, and reactive policies fall short.
As Singh points out, the operational entropy of scale is the real adversary. It is not just zero-days or novel exploits. It is IAM roles with wildcard permissions. It is default configurations left unvalidated. It is secrets committed by accident, and review gates missed in haste. These are not anomalies. They are the logical outcomes of a process where security is a gate, not a guide.
Embedding Security as a Design Decision, Not a Late-Stage Scrutiny
Singh, who has published a paper in IEEE titled “Acer Aspire One Netbooks: A Forensic Challenge“, approaches security not as an overlay but as an intrinsic part of the design system. His methodology prioritizes embedding secure defaults, architecting for predictability, and baking in policy logic at the tooling level—so that security decisions are made implicitly, not manually.
At Amazon, Singh works closely with platform teams to ensure that security principles are reflected in infrastructure-as-code modules, CI/CD pipelines, and developer environments. Encryption at rest is not a toggle; it is a template. Credential scanning is not an optional job; it is a baseline step. Contracts are validated at the API gateway, not in post-deployment reviews.
But for Singh, a 2025 Globee® Awards Judge For Achievement, it is not about cost savings. It is about decision integrity. “The earlier you embed trust assumptions into the system, the fewer compensating controls you need downstream.”
Product-Minded Security: The Cultural Shift No One Talks About
Most secure-by-design failures are not technical. They are cultural. Developers do not ignore security because they are careless. They ignore it because the experience is fragmented, inconsistent, or punitive. Singh believes security must mirror good product design—intuitive, ambient, and opinionated in the right ways.
His work integrates security tools directly into the developer workflow, removing the cognitive tax of compliance. Linting rules flag risky patterns without halting progress. Credential scanners run in the background. Infrastructure modules enforce sane defaults without requiring memorization of policy specs.
The result is not just safer code. It is measurable. It is a more aligned organization. Security stops being adversarial and becomes collaborative. “Most developers want to do the right thing,” Singh notes. “But they will always default to the path of least resistance. That path needs to be secure by default.”
From Auditors to Architects of Behavior
As regulatory and market pressures increase, security teams can no longer afford to operate as post-facto auditors. They must become architects of behavior—shaping how systems are composed, how workflows are structured, and how defaults are shipped.
Singh sees this evolution not as a burden but as an opportunity. “If developers ship the product, then what they inherit by default is your real security posture,” he explains. “That is not a tooling problem. That is a design responsibility.”
This philosophy isn’t just operational—it’s academic. Singh whose scholarly paper titled “Reinforcement Learning for Secure Applications: Integrating ML and Data Engineering for Cloud Security”, proposes intelligent, policy-aware architectures built to scale with developer workflows. The paper bridges behavioral modeling with enforcement mechanisms, underscoring his belief that systems must be designed for influence, not just inspection.
In practice, this means collaborating earlier with platform teams, contributing to developer portals, and ensuring security principles are encapsulated in shared templates. It also means accepting that security UX is as important as enforcement.
For Singh, secure-by-design is not a slogan. It is an architectural discipline and a cultural realignment. It is the recognition that security teams are no longer gatekeepers. They are infrastructure designers, developer advocates, and systems thinkers. In a world where policy now demands security by default, Singh offers a simple truth: to embed security at scale, you must first design for adoption. Not enforcement. Adoption.
