Staff Security Engineer, Application Security

Posted May 23

About Trail of Bits

Trail of Bits helps secure the world's most targeted organizations and products. We combine high-end security research with a real-world attacker mentality to reduce risk and fortify code.

As a cybersecurity research and consulting firm, our team has worked on some of the most innovative software projects millions of people use worldwide. We help the best companies in the world — Epic Games, Google, Microsoft, Zoom, and others — with their most complex security challenges by designing and building new technology, researching new techniques, and reviewing the security of the latest available products before they hit the market.

Our team considers developing and sharing our knowledge as a natural part of doing business. We push to publish every tool or project so the public — not just our clients — benefit from our expertise and innovations. It's a practice that's earned us industry accolades and helped contribute to our double-digit bottom-line growth.

Role

Our Assurance team is responsible for reviewing low-level, high-assurance software in the finance, tech, defense, and blockchain industries. Our evaluations allow our clients to make informed decisions about risk to their systems, including how to minimize or mitigate security issues. Our team is comprised of experts in operating systems, compilers, and cloud infrastructure with a keen eye for applying research and developing custom tools to enhance our reach.

As a Staff Engineer, you will be part of a small, dynamic team that reviews highly trusted code, performs architecture reviews or threat models, and other types of security-focused analysis on behalf of our clients. You will provide value to our clients through your expertise and experience to assist the team in helping them find difficult issues. On any given day, you may be building cheats for DRM'd video games, exploiting elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in kernel drivers, or reviewing isolation primitives intended to contain the effects of exploitation.

You will work in collaboration with other assurance engineers to execute successful client projects and to build impactful tools. You will have opportunities to collaborate with our Research & Engineering team to help secure funding from government agencies for software security research that advances the state of the art, both within our team and the industry at large.

Between engagements, we apply our engineering skills to build custom tools to rapidly assess, exploit, or secure the code that we work with. You will also be given time for personal and professional development learning opportunities.

Responsibilities

  • Work directly with leading industry teams to review their code and help secure their products.
  • Design and implement solutions to difficult engineering and research problems, examples include building a novel fuzzer, static analyzer, or dynamic instrumentation to solve specific challenges.
  • Collaborate with engineers in both assurance and research & engineering to maintain and continually improve our existing security tools using modern software engineering practices.
  • Develop new security tools by staying at the forefront of security research and integrating lessons learned from our work with clients to build the state-of-the-art.

Requirements

  • Experience with low-level or cloud-native software, either as an engineer or security researcher
  • Experience in reading relevant computer science academic research
  • Background in or prior regular use of programming language theory a plus
  • Familiar with the agile development, Github flow, and modern software engineering practices
  • Proficiency in one or more programming languages (we use C++, C, Python, Go, Rust, and Haskell)
  • Experience with bugging skills and/or experience with reverse engineering
  • Proven ability to drive and complete projects
  • Attracted to learning new technologies
  • Able to communicate complex technical material to clients and funding agencies
  • Adept at writing. We highly encourage all engineers to get regular face-time with clients, write company blog posts about their accomplishments, and deliver presentations to the technical community.

The US estimated base salary for this full-time W2 employee role is $190,000-$215,000 not including bonus and benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, location, and employment type. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by a variety of factors, include but not limited to work location, job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Company Perks

  • Before, during and after COVID-19, our workforce works flexibly. Many employees choose to work from home around the globe. As long as you deliver against your goals, we encourage you to harness your personal working style to let you work best.
  • Liberal expense policy for acquiring the equipment and software that help you do your job. If we need hardware to work effectively, we buy it. 
  • We offer exceptional and tailored technical, leadership and organizational training for our team members. Everyone is encouraged to identify additional opportunities for personal professional growth with working at Trail of Bits.
  • We routinely highlight the amazing work our employees do via our blog, product offerings, and conference talks. We celebrate you!
  • We're at the forefront of a number of markets and have the internal expertise and the ambition to capitalize on those opportunities. Our employees see their work in use and valued by many others.

Highlighting some of our US & Canadian Full-Time Employee Benefits:

  • Multiple generous health, vision, and dental insurance plans.
  • Ancillary benefits including life and disability insurance.
  • Retirement plan with 5% company matching.
  • 4 months paid parental leave.
  • Moving expenses to NY: $5,000 one-time.
  • Charitable donations matching up to $2,000.
  • One time $1,000 at home office expense stipend.
  • $500/year personal learning & development budget.
  • Executive coaching for managers & above.
  • Bonuses for recruiting, public speaking, tool releases, blog posts, academic posters, proposals, and whitepapers, and end-of-year bonuses based on company, team, and personal performance.
  • 20 days of PTO per year for vacation, sick, and personal time off.
  • 15 company holidays per year.
  • Carbon offsets for your personal and corporate carbon emissions through Project Wren.

Dedication to diversity, equity & inclusion

Trail of Bits is committed to creating and maintaining a diverse and inclusive workplace where our employees can thrive and be themselves! We welcome all persons into our community. We embrace the diversity of gender, gender identity or expression, race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical and mental disabilities, medical condition, genetic characteristic, sexual orientation, marital status, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or perceived membership in any of these groups.