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.
Security Culture and Awareness
Covers strategies and practice for creating and sustaining a security minded organization where security is a shared responsibility. Topics include designing and running awareness programs and campaigns, embedding secure practices into the software development life cycle and daily workflows, translating policies into observable behaviors, and fostering psychological safety so people raise concerns and report issues. Includes practical initiatives such as role based training, phishing simulations, tabletop exercises, onboarding flows, manager and executive engagement, incentives and recognition programs, and tooling or process changes that make secure choices easier. Also covers measurement and evaluation approaches such as baseline and follow up surveys, behavior and compliance metrics, incident trends, adoption rates, training completion, and return on investment calculations, plus change management techniques used to drive sustained behavior change across teams and business units.
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.
Communicating Security to Stakeholders
Ability to translate security concepts, findings, incidents, and trade offs into business language for non technical audiences. This includes presenting security risks and threat models in terms of business impact, explaining severity and likelihood, recommending mitigations and investments, and persuading executives or other stakeholders to prioritize security actions. Candidates should show how they remove technical jargon, frame trade offs between security functionality and cost, and communicate incident details, remediation steps, and residual risk clearly.
Supply Chain and Third Party Risk
Encompasses identification, assessment, and mitigation of security risks introduced by external vendors, suppliers, and infrastructure dependencies across the technology supply chain. Candidates should be able to design and execute vendor security assessment frameworks and questionnaires, perform risk tiering and prioritization, and integrate vendor controls into system architecture and procurement practices. Key areas include software bill of materials and dependency mapping, supply chain integrity controls such as code signing and secure build pipelines, vulnerability and patch management for third party components, and evaluation of managed services and cloud provider dependencies. The topic also covers contractual requirements such as service level agreements and audit rights, vendor onboarding and offboarding controls, continuous monitoring and telemetry for vendor posture, incident response coordination with third parties, remediation and escalation processes, key performance indicators and governance for a vendor risk program, and automation and tooling to scale assessments and monitoring. Interviewers may ask candidates to design a comprehensive vendor risk management program, address supply chain attack vectors, and align third party security practices with compliance obligations and organizational risk appetite.
Security Trade Offs and Organizational Context
Mature understanding that perfect security is impossible and that security decisions involve trade-offs. Ability to discuss balancing security with operational requirements, user experience, performance, and cost. Understanding that excessive security controls can be counterproductive. Recognizing that security must enable business objectives, not just block everything.
Security Metrics and Reporting to Leadership
Develop security metrics that demonstrate value to business leadership. Discuss how you've quantified security ROI, communicated security posture, and influenced budget and strategy decisions through data-driven metrics.
Regulatory and Cloud Compliance
Covers design and operational practices for meeting regulatory requirements and security standards both on premises and in cloud environments. Candidates should demonstrate understanding of common compliance frameworks and controls, how security testing such as penetration testing fits into compliance programs, how to scope tests to satisfy control requirements, and what evidence auditors expect. Evaluate knowledge of the shared responsibility model for cloud providers, audit trail and logging design, monitoring and alerting for compliance, and procedures for collecting and retaining compliance evidence. Includes designing architectures to meet industry and geographic requirements such as data residency and privacy obligations, selecting and configuring cloud provider compliance and configuration services, integrating automated compliance checks and continuous evidence collection, and documenting controls for audits and incident response. Interviewers will probe mapping of technical controls to regulatory requirements, practical practices for scoping and reporting security assessments, and approaches to maintain ongoing compliance in dynamic cloud environments.
Security and Privacy Metrics
Addresses how to measure security and privacy program effectiveness and communicate value. Topics include security KPIs like mean time to detect and mean time to respond, vulnerability remediation time, patch compliance, incident frequency and severity, and methods to assess return on security investments. For privacy, include metrics such as audit findings, training completion, data subject request processing times, vendor assessments, privacy impact assessments, and breach metrics. Candidates should be able to explain limitations of common metrics and how to link security and privacy measurements to business risk and governance reporting.
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.