Description
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 Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter.
SONAR is the adversary research team within Elastic Security. We discover novel adversary behavior through malware reverse engineering, threat hunting, and vulnerability research, turn every discovery into protections that ship to customers, and share our work publicly through Elastic Security Labs.
We want to make environments hostile to adversaries, and to put rare knowledge and tooling within reach of every defender.
Responsibilities
As a Senior Security Research Engineer, you will take on our hardest analysis work and help set the technical direction of the team.
- Reverse engineer malware nobody has documented yet. Take apart obfuscated and packed samples across Windows, macOS, and Linux, and recover how they communicate, configure themselves, and stay hidden.
- Operate global data systems to identify and mitigate threats. Work through data from millions of endpoints to surface the activity worth investigating, build the campaign context that tells customers who is targeting them, and push mitigation back out across the fleet.
- Turn every discovery into a shipped protection, and the tooling that scales it. Author the signatures that stop what you find, and build the automation and AI-assisted workflows that make the next investigation faster than the last.
- Build your public research reputation. Publish on Elastic Security Labs, release tools and detection artifacts to our public GitHub repositories, and present at conferences.
- Collaborate across Elastic Security. Your discoveries become the rules and models that neighboring teams build and ship, and you will work with those teams directly on shared threat intelligence and detection engineering projects.
- Help lead the team's technical direction. Take point on investigations that run for months, raise the bar in review, and mentor researchers earlier in their careers.
Requirements
- 6+ years of professional experience reverse engineering malware and researching adversary tradecraft, static and dynamic, across multiple executable formats (PE, ELF, Mach-O) and architectures (x86-64, ARM), including obfuscated and packed code that defeats automated tooling.
- Python development experience for research tooling and automation, plus the ability to read C and C++.
- YARA authorship and hunting at scale. You write signatures that hold up against the next variant, and you can find a weak signal in a very large telemetry dataset.
- Working knowledge of the fundamentals: Windows and Linux internals, network protocols including HTTP and TLS, and enough applied cryptography to recognize what is protecting a configuration blob.
- Technical writing ability. You can turn a long investigation into a clear, public analysis that other defenders can act on.
- You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
- Proven ability to seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or scrum teams based on dynamic business priorities.
- A collaborative mentality, an eagerness to learn new skills and emerging technologies, and a passion for protecting the world's data from attack!
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