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.
Enterprise Security Architecture and Framework Design
Designing comprehensive security architecture and enterprise scale security frameworks for large organizations. Topics include layered security and defense in depth applied at enterprise scale, zero trust and microsegmentation strategies, identity and access management at scale, network segmentation and secure network architecture, encryption strategies for data at rest and in transit, secrets and key management, audit logging and telemetry placement, incident response integration, backup and disaster recovery planning, and platform and infrastructure hardening. Candidates should demonstrate how to align security architecture with business goals, translate an architectural vision into a prioritized roadmap and governance model, reason about scalability and interoperability, justify trade offs between security and developer velocity, and design automation and orchestration to enable secure operations at scale.
Handling Novel Technologies and Evidence
Covers how a candidate responds when encountering unfamiliar hardware, software, devices, file systems, encryption schemes, or novel data structures and evidence types. Assess the candidate on troubleshooting fundamentals applied to unknown systems, rapid learning and research strategies, use of documentation and external resources, when and how to engage subject matter experts, and how they validate and document new techniques. Interviewers may probe for examples of unexpected findings, how the candidate iterated on investigative approaches, risk management under time pressure, and how they ensured forensic soundness and reproducibility when standard tools or processes did not apply.