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).
Security Incident Response and Operations
Covers the practices, processes, and tooling for responding to security incidents and operating a security capability. Topics include the security incident lifecycle of preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post incident review; development and execution of playbooks and runbooks tailored to threat types; severity classification and decision criteria for escalation; evidence preservation and forensic analysis and chain of custody; crisis communication to stakeholders and regulators; notification and regulatory compliance considerations; and coordination with legal, privacy, communications, and executive leadership. Also includes operational aspects of building and staffing a security operations center, on call schedules and escalation, ticketing and case management, leadership and coordination during major incidents, running blameless post incident reviews to identify systemic improvements, and integration of security incident learnings into engineering and operations.
Company Security Culture Alignment
Demonstrate that you have researched the specific company and understand its security posture, public initiatives, and how security supports the company business model. Explain why the company and the role appeal to you from a security perspective, referencing recent security programs, known challenges, or strategic priorities when possible. Show how your skills, experience, and security philosophy align with the company approaches to risk management, incident response, cloud and application security, and secure development practices. Convey genuine motivation to contribute to and grow within the organization while respecting its values and security tradeoffs.
Privacy Preserving Cryptography
Techniques that combine cryptography and privacy engineering to enable secure computation and data protection. Core topics include homomorphic encryption for computing over encrypted data, secure multi party computation for collaborative computation without revealing inputs, differential privacy methods for statistical analysis with privacy guarantees, oblivious transfer and related secure protocol primitives, and zero knowledge proof systems for proving statements without revealing secrets. Coverage includes practical use cases, performance and scalability limitations, parameter and threat model selection, trade offs between privacy and utility, deployment challenges, and when to prefer one approach over another.
Security Monitoring and Threat Detection
Covers the principles and practical design of security monitoring, logging, and threat detection across environments including cloud scale infrastructure. Topics include data collection strategies, centralized logging and storage, security information and event management architecture, pipeline and ingestion design for high volume and high velocity data, retention and indexing tradeoffs, observability and telemetry sources, and alerting and tuning to reduce noise. Detection techniques include signature based detection, anomaly detection, indicators of compromise, behavioral detection, correlation rules, and threat intelligence integration. Also covers evaluation metrics such as false positives and false negatives, detection coverage and lead time, incident escalation, playbook integration with incident response, automation and orchestration for investigation and remediation, and operational concerns such as scalability, cost, reliability, and privacy or compliance constraints.
Security Breaches and Lessons
Study of real world security incidents, breach case studies, and historical failures in cryptography and system design. Topics include common attack chains and kill chain methodology, threat actor techniques such as lateral movement, privilege escalation, persistence, and data exfiltration, and supply chain and implementation weaknesses. Also covers famous cryptographic and protocol failures, for example weak randomness, algorithm collisions, padding oracle and memory safety exploits, and how they arose. Candidates should be able to explain root causes, detection and forensics approaches, incident response and mitigation strategies, lessons learned that changed best practices, and how to apply those lessons to secure design, threat modeling, testing, and operational controls.