Security Engineer, Application Security

Trail of Bits seeks a Security Engineer, Application Security within our growing Software Assurance practice. You will conduct comprehensive security assessments of client software with a focus on low-level code analysis, examining system architecture, security boundaries, access controls, and platform security mechanisms.

On any given day, you might analyze vulnerabilities in application code, automate the detection of security misconfigurations in cloud environments, assess privilege escalation capabilities, or review security boundaries in complex systems. Working alongside other security engineers, you'll contribute to client projects while building impactful tools. In short, your work will land at the intersection of Vulnerability Research and Application Security.

In addition to working with leading technology companies in the private sector, you will have opportunities to collaborate with our Research & Engineering team to help secure funding from government agencies for advanced security research that bridges vulnerability research and application security, advancing the state of the art both within our team and industry at large.

What You'll Achieve

• Security Assessment: Conduct comprehensive low-level code security assessments across applications, examining vulnerabilities in system services, access control implementation, inter-process communication, and platform security controls while developing mitigation strategies.
• Security Tool Development: Design and implement custom security tools for automated vulnerability detection, focusing on both application-specific and general security testing needs to bridge the gap between vulnerability research and application security.
• Architecture Review: Perform detailed architecture reviews and threat modeling of complex software systems and cloud environments, identifying potential security weaknesses in areas such as data flows, authentication mechanisms, and API security while providing remediation guidance.
• Client Engagement: Work directly with industry-leading teams to review their application infrastructure and architecture, helping secure their environments through deep technical analysis and recommendations.
• Research & Innovation: Contribute to the advancement of application security, developing new methodologies and tools while staying up to date with the latest security developments in both traditional and emerging technology ecosystems.

• Application security assessment experience. Direct experience conducting low-level code security assessments of complex software, identifying and mitigating application and system-level vulnerabilities. You read the code, not just the scanner output.
• Manual code review depth. Hands-on experience performing manual code reviews to find vulnerabilities that automated tools miss. You can explain why a bug is exploitable, not just that a tool flagged it.
• Static and dynamic analysis fluency. Experience using static and dynamic analysis tools as part of a deeper review process, including knowledge of where these tools fall short and how to extend them.
• Binary analysis and reverse engineering. Experience performing binary analysis and reverse engineering of compiled software. Comfortable with disassemblers, decompilers, and the surrounding tooling.
• Memory corruption vulnerabilities and mitigations. Demonstrated experience identifying memory corruption vulnerabilities and reasoning about modern mitigations.
• Programming proficiency across multiple languages. Hands-on experience programming in two or more of Rust, Golang, Kotlin, Swift, Objective-C, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Ruby, C, or C++, used for both security analysis and tool development.

Trail of Bits, Inc. participates in E-Verify, the US federal electronic employment eligibility verification program.