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 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.
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.
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.