Senior Security Research Engineer

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale , unleashing the potential of businesses and people.

The Elastic Security Endpoint Protections team researches, designs, and builds the visibility and prevention capabilities at the core of Elastic Defend, our endpoint and SIEM security solution. We are looking for a Senior Security Research Engineer to help lead our efforts to build innovative features that secure our users against the latest emerging threats.

Responsibilities

• Research emerging attacker techniques and turn them into shipped protections. Study real-world tradecraft across in-memory threats, injection, credential theft, ransomware, and kernel tampering, then design protections that hold up against an adversary actively trying to defeat them.
• Build and extend endpoint visibility. Instrument new event sources across Windows, macOS, and Linux, deepen the telemetry we already collect, and close the gaps attackers rely on.
• Develop production code that runs everywhere. Write performant, stable C/C++ that executes on millions of endpoints.
• Reverse engineer malware and study evasion. Learn how attackers bypass endpoint security controls in the wild, and feed that understanding directly into the protections you design and harden.
• Own efficacy end to end. Review customer telemetry at fleet scale, investigate false positives and performance regressions, and establish mitigation strategies.
• Extend protection parity across platforms. Bring the depth we have on Windows to macOS and Linux, and support new hardware architectures as they reach the enterprise.
• Collaborate across Elastic Security. Implement endpoint code alongside peers in multiple countries and time zones, and work with the detection engineers, malware researchers, and data scientists who rely on your telemetry.
• Help lead the team's technical direction. Take point on initiatives that span multiple releases, raise the bar in design and code reviews, and mentor engineers earlier in their careers.
• Publish and present. Share your research on Elastic Security Labs, present at conferences, and contribute to the open source projects that organizations around the world rely on.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional experience analyzing attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and building detection methods for real security threats.
• 6+ years of development experience in C, C++, and Python.
• Deep operating system internals knowledge, in both kernel and user mode.
• In-depth reverse engineering and malware analysis experience.
• An adversarial instinct. You anticipate how a protection will be evaded before it ships, and design for resilience.
• A collaborative mentality and an eagerness to learn new skills, new platforms, and emerging technologies.
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code.
• You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team.

Nice to Have

• Vulnerability research and exploit development, particularly with a track record of responsible disclosure to platform vendors.
• Red teaming experience, or a background in building offensive tooling and defeating endpoint security products.
• Kernel-mode development, including driver development and debugging.
• Ownership or long-term maintenance of an open-source security tool with a real user base.
• Conference speaking experience.
• Experience applying machine learning to endpoint security problems.
• Familiarity with the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana) and Elastic Security.

Benefits

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary.
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations.
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• Generous number of vacation days each year.
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service.
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love.
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.