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 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.
Compliance, Audit Logging, and Change Management
Understanding compliance requirements relevant to infrastructure (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, etc.). Implementing audit logging for compliance purposes. Change management procedures and change approval workflows. Maintaining audit trails for all infrastructure changes and access. Regular compliance audits and remediation. Documentation of infrastructure changes and reasons. Version control for infrastructure configurations. Compliance reporting and audit readiness.