Security & Compliance Topics
Governance, compliance frameworks, regulatory requirements, compliance implementation, and compliance-driven risk management. Covers compliance frameworks (SOX, GDPR, HIPAA, FCPA, etc.), regulatory interpretation, compliance control design, audit and control effectiveness evaluation, and compliance process management. For operational security implementation and technical threat mitigation, see Security Engineering & Operations.
Compliance and Data Protection Regulations
Understanding of regulatory requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, CCPA, PCI-DSS), implementing controls to meet compliance obligations, data retention policies, audit requirements, and working with compliance and legal teams.
Compliance Program Design and Management
Covers the end to end design, development, scaling, and operation of organizational compliance programs and the related risk management processes. Candidates should understand governance structures and roles and responsibilities for compliance, the core program components such as policies and procedures, training and awareness, monitoring and testing, incident reporting and investigation, corrective actions and remediation planning, and metrics for measuring program effectiveness. The topic includes risk identification and risk assessment approaches, translating risk into risk based controls, designing monitoring and auditing strategies, audit trails and approval workflows, and balancing control effectiveness with operational efficiency. Candidates should be able to explain preparing for and responding to audits and regulatory inquiries, evolving the program as the organization grows or as regulations change, aligning compliance objectives with business goals, and selecting and applying compliance frameworks and supporting technologies. Familiarity with widely used control frameworks such as the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations Internal Control Integrated Framework and Sarbanes Oxley Act requirements as well as industry specific compliance architectures is expected. For entry level roles focus on understanding why components exist and how they interconnect rather than designing a program from scratch.
Compliance and Security in Migration
Design compliance and security controls to meet regulatory and audit requirements during cloud migration. Topics include data classification and residency encryption and key management identity and access management and least privilege network segmentation secure configuration hardening audit trails and evidence collection vulnerability management and monitoring. Plan validation steps that auditors and compliance teams can use during and after migration and define remediation and exception handling processes that preserve control without blocking business needs.
Compliance Architecture and Controls
Focuses on translating legal and regulatory obligations into technical architecture and operational controls. Candidates should demonstrate how to map requirements such as data handling rules, consent models, retention and deletion mechanisms, data subject rights workflows, breach notification processes, and processor agreement obligations into concrete design decisions and controls. Expected topics include data residency and sovereignty decisions, encryption and key management, access control and privileged access management, audit logging and tamper resistant audit trails, retention and immutability policies, backups and recovery, segmentation and isolation, change management and configuration baselining, and third party and vendor risk controls. Candidates should be able to explain trade offs between engineering feasibility and regulatory obligations, provide examples of systems or features designed or modified to meet compliance needs, describe interactions with legal, privacy, and compliance teams to interpret rules, and explain how testing, monitoring, incident response, and documentation support audit readiness and continuous compliance.
Security and Compliance Architecture
Architecting systems to meet security requirements and regulatory and compliance obligations. Candidates should understand how to embed data classification, data governance, encryption, least privilege access, audit trails and logging, secure design patterns, and threat modeling into architectures. Expect discussion of how architectural choices affect obligations under common regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and System and Organization Controls frameworks. Topics include documenting architecture for compliance reviewers, retention and data residency considerations, denial of service mitigation and web application firewall strategies, and balancing security controls with usability and operational cost. Candidates should be able to describe when to engage legal and compliance teams and how to design for auditability and evidence capture.
Cloud Security and Governance
Covers securing cloud environments and establishing governance and cost control practices. Core technical areas include identity and access management with least privilege, role and policy design, encryption at rest and in transit, virtual private cloud and network segmentation, security groups and firewall rules, key management services, logging and centralized audit trails, monitoring and alerting, compliance frameworks and controls mapping for regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, data governance (classification, retention, access control), and secure design of data pipelines. Also includes cloud cost management and optimization techniques such as tagging and resource organization, budgeting and alerting, rightsizing and autoscaling, reserved and committed capacity, storage lifecycle policies and data tiering, cost-aware architecture patterns, and operational processes for balancing security, compliance, and cost.