Senior Vulnerability Engineer
Boston · Costa Mesa · Washington · Boston, MA (BOS-01) · Costa Mesa, CA (OC-00) · Washington, DC (DC-01) · USD 191,000-253,000 · Full-time · Posted Sep 25, 2026
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Location
- Boston · Costa Mesa · Washington · Boston, MA (BOS-01) · Costa Mesa, CA (OC-00) · Washington, DC (DC-01)
- Salary
- USD 191,000-253,000 · Base salary
About the role
- The Vulnerability Engineer will discover novel vulnerabilities in hardware and software systems and translate research into technical artifacts.
- The role focuses on original vulnerability discovery across embedded systems, firmware, applications, protocols, and hardware/software integration boundaries.
Responsibilities
- Find novel vulnerabilities in software, firmware, embedded systems, protocols, update paths, device interfaces, and hardware/software integration boundaries.
- Design and execute vulnerability research plans combining code review, reverse engineering, fuzzing, emulation, dynamic instrumentation, and hardware analysis.
- Build custom fuzzers, harnesses, emulators, instrumentation, triage workflows, and proof-of-concept tooling.
- Analyze root cause, exploitability, operational impact, and mitigation options for discovered vulnerabilities.
- Partner with cross-functional engineering teams to validate findings and drive practical remediation.
- Write clear technical reports including evidence, reproduction steps, exploitability assessment, and impact.
- Design hardware-in-the-loop vulnerability experiments combining software exploitation, protocol analysis, and lab instrumentation.
- Develop tooling to automate experiment orchestration, device interaction, data collection, and crash triage.
Requirements
- Strong experience discovering vulnerabilities in firmware, applications, network services, embedded Linux systems, drivers, protocols, IoT devices, or hardware-adjacent systems.
- Proficiency with one or more programming languages such as Python, C, C++, Rust, or Go.
- Experience with fuzzing, harness development, crash triage, exploitability analysis, source-code review, binary analysis, or dynamic instrumentation.
- Ability to reason about memory corruption, logic flaws, authentication and authorization failures, unsafe parsing, and concurrency issues.
- Hands-on familiarity with Linux, embedded systems, networking, debugging, and common security research tooling.
- Ability to communicate vulnerability impact, reproduction steps, and mitigation options clearly.
- Demonstrated bias toward practical, mission-enabling security outcomes.
- Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.
- Experience evaluating vulnerabilities across embedded protection mechanisms such as secure boot, firmware update paths, and key storage.
- Comfort working with lab-based vulnerability validation using hardware interfaces, protocol analyzers, or debuggers.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience finding vulnerabilities in boot chains, firmware update mechanisms, device identity systems, cryptographic integrations, or anti-tamper mechanisms.
- Experience with advanced techniques such as coverage-guided fuzzing, symbolic execution, differential testing, fault injection, or protocol state modeling.
- Familiarity with reverse-engineering tools such as Ghidra, IDA Pro, Binary Ninja, QEMU, Frida, or gdb/lldb.
- Background in embedded, aerospace, robotic, RF, or cyber-physical systems.
- Track record of producing high-quality vulnerability research artifacts, internal tooling, conference-quality writeups, or CVEs.
- Experience applying side-channel analysis, black-box testing, or hardware-assisted fuzzing.
- Experience with RF protocols, cryptographic protocol analysis, FPGA/SoC security, signal processing, or board-level vulnerability assessment.
- Demonstrated technical leadership, mentorship, or ownership of complex vulnerability research efforts.
Benefits
- Highly competitive equity grants
- Top-tier benefits for full-time employees
Workplace
- Role is based in Boston, MA; Costa Mesa, CA; or Washington, DC.
Skills
- Python
- C
- C++
- Rust
- Go
- Linux
- Ghidra
- IDA Pro
- Binary Ninja
- QEMU
- Frida
- Gdb
Show all 15 skills
- Lldb
- FPGA
- SoC
