Security Engineering & Operations Topics
Operational security practices, secure systems implementation, threat modeling, penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and security operations at production scale. Covers network security, endpoint security, secure architecture implementation, incident response mechanics, and security automation. Distinct from Security & Compliance (which addresses governance, compliance frameworks, and policy) and from Security Research & Innovation (which addresses novel techniques and research contributions).
Multi Tenancy and Shared Platform Security
Designing and operating platforms that host multiple teams or customers while ensuring isolation, security, and fair resource sharing. This includes tenancy model tradeoffs such as single tenant versus shared clusters or accounts, logical isolation techniques such as namespaces and virtual networks, role based access control design, quota and resource partitioning, audit logging and tenant level observability, secret management and encryption, preventing noisy neighbor and data leakage scenarios, admission policies and enforcement points, onboarding and offboarding flows, and compliance and auditing implications. Candidates should be able to evaluate isolation approaches, propose secure onboarding and provisioning flows, and explain testing and incident response strategies for multi tenancy platforms.
Container and Kubernetes Security
Security for containerized applications and Kubernetes platforms across the full lifecycle: secure image creation and supply chain, image scanning and vulnerability management, secure base images, image signing, runtime protection and intrusion detection, container isolation and least privilege at the container level, secrets management, pod security policies and admission controllers, network policies and microsegmentation, role based access control for cluster access, cluster hardening and configuration management, secure cluster bootstrapping and upgrades, and compliance considerations and audit logging for container environments. Candidates should be able to discuss tooling, threat models specific to cloud native workloads, and operational practices for preventing and responding to container and orchestration security incidents.
Infrastructure Security and Access Control
Design and implementation of security controls within infrastructure and access management. Topics include network segmentation and isolation, security groups and network access control lists, identity and access management policies and least privilege principles, encryption at rest and in transit, secrets management and key management practices, audit logging and monitoring, secure remote access patterns such as bastion hosts and virtual private networks, session recording and privileged access governance, threat modeling for infrastructure components, and trade offs for compliance and operational complexity.
Secrets and Sensitive Data Management
Covers the practices, tools, and operational processes for securely storing, accessing, rotating, and protecting secrets and other sensitive data used by applications and infrastructure. Candidates should know centralized secret vaults such as HashiCorp Vault, Amazon Web Services Secrets Manager, Microsoft Azure Key Vault, and Google Secret Manager; strategies for automated and manual credential rotation including emergency rotation procedures; integration with continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines and infrastructure as code; techniques to prevent secret leakage into source code repositories, logs, and monitoring systems; encryption of secrets at rest and in transit; application of least privilege and identity and access management roles for secret access; use of short lived and ephemeral credentials and service accounts as alternatives to long lived static credentials; audit logging, monitoring, and alerting for secret access and misuse; secret scanning, secure secret referencing patterns in code and templates, and operational plans for rotating credentials without downtime.
Infrastructure Security and Compliance
Designing, implementing, and operating security and compliance controls for infrastructure and delivery pipelines at scale. Topics include identity and access management, authentication and authorization patterns, role based access control and least privilege, secrets management and rotation, encryption for data at rest and in transit, network segmentation and microsegmentation, zero trust architecture, audit logging and retention, vulnerability scanning and patch and remediation workflows, endpoint protection, threat detection and monitoring, threat modeling and risk assessment, incident detection and response planning and runbooks, software supply chain security including artifact signing and dependency scanning and provenance, policy as code and automated security gates in continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, automated testing and validation of controls, and the trade offs between security controls and developer velocity. Also covers embedding and operationalizing compliance requirements from common regulatory frameworks and standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Service Organization Controls two, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and International Organization for Standardization two seven zero zero one, and how those requirements influence architecture, controls, automation, monitoring, and auditability as systems scale globally.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) & Supply Chain Security
Understand how to identify and manage third-party dependencies and open-source components. Know tools and techniques for detecting vulnerable dependencies, managing license compliance, and responding to supply chain attacks. Discuss how to evaluate third-party security, conduct security reviews of dependencies, and maintain a software bill of materials (SBOM).
DevSecOps and Secure SDLC
Covers integrating security into the software development lifecycle and operational pipelines. Topics include securing continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, automated security testing such as static application security testing, dynamic application security testing, and software composition analysis, dependency and container image scanning, secrets management in pipelines, vulnerability management, security gates and shift left security practices. Also includes infrastructure as code security, runtime and deployment security, compliance automation, interpreting and tuning security tool output to reduce false positives, and designing secure development architecture that enables rapid delivery while maintaining required security controls.
Cloud Identity and Access Management
Comprehensive coverage of identity and access management in cloud environments. Candidates should understand identity models and authentication and authorization patterns, design and implement role based access control and attribute based access control, author and scope policies, apply permission boundaries and the principle of least privilege, and manage service identities and workload identities for virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. Topics include federated identity and single sign on, multi factor authentication, service accounts and cross account trust, ephemeral credentials and credential rotation, secrets and key management using vaults and hardware security modules, encryption key lifecycle, avoidance of hard coded credentials, policy as code and automation with infrastructure as code, auditing and access logging for detection and compliance, and integration with enterprise identity providers. Interview scenarios assess policy design, least privilege exercises, troubleshooting misconfigured permissions, and trade offs between cloud native managed services and custom solutions.
CI CD Security and Secrets Management
Focuses on embedding security into continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines and safe handling of credentials and secrets. Topics include secret storage and retrieval patterns such as managed key stores, secrets manager services, encrypted parameter stores, hardware security modules and key management, ephemeral credentials and dynamic secrets, credential rotation and automated rotation policies, secure injection of secrets into build and runtime environments, minimizing secret exposure in logs and artifacts, access controls for pipeline agents and runners, isolation and least privilege for CI CD infrastructure, artifact signing and provenance, vulnerability scanning and software composition analysis, static and dynamic analysis in pipelines, supply chain security controls, policy as code and gating, and operational auditing and incident response for pipeline compromises.