Senior Security Research Engineer

What is The Role

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. You will collaborate with the broader Elastic Security team, a diverse group of skilled researchers, data scientists, and engineers who bring deep domain knowledge in their respective areas. Our geographically dispersed team values positivity and inclusivity in the workplace, clear communication, collaborative learning, and guided mentorship.

We don't just claim our protections work. In recent third-party enterprise protection testing, Elastic Security earned a perfect malware protection score with zero false alarms, the top result in the field. If you have a passion for security research and would enjoy the challenge of devising novel methods for thwarting malicious actors in an ever-evolving threat landscape, join our growing team!

What You Will Be Doing

• 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. Every source you add becomes a foundation for other teams.
• Develop production code that runs everywhere. Write performant, stable C/C++ that executes on millions of endpoints, where a memory leak or a few milliseconds of overhead is a customer-visible problem.
• 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. Shipping the feature is the beginning of the job, not the end.
• 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.

What You Bring

• 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, with the judgment to write code that is safe, fast, and maintainable in a security-critical codebase.
• Deep operating system internals knowledge, in both kernel and user mode, deep enough to reason about undocumented behavior and find security-relevant structures nobody has written about yet. Windows depth is what we need most, with macOS or Linux depth close behind.
• In-depth reverse engineering and malware analysis experience, and comfort with the tooling that makes hard binaries readable.
• An adversarial instinct. You anticipate how a protection will be evaded before it ships, and design for resilience rather than for the proof of concept in front of you.
• 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, while still owning the final outcomes.
• You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication.
• Passion for protecting the world's data from attack!

Bonus Points

• 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 (e.g., Black Hat, DEF CON, CODE BLUE, Virus Bulletin) or an established publication record.
• Experience applying machine learning to endpoint security problems.
• Familiarity with the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana) and Elastic Security.

The typical starting salary range for this role is: 133100 - 210600 USD
The typical starting salary range for this role in the select locations listed above is: 159900 - 252900 USD