Senior Security Research Engineer (Security Operations and Novel Adversary Research)

Elastic; Ottawa; Hybrid; CAD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully paid health coverage for you and

Flexible location and schedule

Generous vacation days

Parental leave

Volunteer time off

Charitable matching

Job summary

Elastic is seeking a Senior Security Research Engineer to tackle the hardest adversary analyses and set team direction. You will reverse engineer malware across Windows, macOS, and Linux, and develop detections and protections for customers.

Join a distributed team that values collaboration, mentorship, and public research. Expect opportunities to publish, present, and contribute to Elastic Security Labs while guiding investigations that run for months.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional experience reverse engineering malware and researching adversary tradecraft.
• Experience handling samples across PE/ELF/Mach-O with obfuscation/packing.
• Ability to turn investigations into public analyses and actionable protections.
• Strong fundamentals in Windows/Linux internals and network protocols.

Responsibilities

• Reverse engineer malware across Windows, macOS, and Linux to uncover how it communicates and stays hidden.
• Build signature-based and behavior-based detections, and ship protections to customers.
• Publish analyses publicly and contribute to Elastic Security Labs.

Skills

Reverse engineering

Threat hunting

Malware analysis

Python development

C/C++ reading

Windows internals

Linux internals

Network protocols

Applied cryptography

Technical writing

Public speaking

CTF participation

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Ghidra

IDA Pro

Wireshark

YARA

Elastic Stack

Job description

• SONAR is the adversary research team within Elastic Security
• We discover novel adversary behavior through malware reverse engineering, threat hunting, and vulnerability research, turn every discovery into protections that ship to customers, and share our work publicly through Elastic Security Labs
• We want to make environments hostile to adversaries, and to put rare knowledge and tooling within reach of every defender
• We are looking for a Senior Security Research Engineer to take on our hardest analysis work and help set the technical direction of the team
• Our geographically dispersed team values positivity and inclusivity in the workplace, clear communication, collaborative learning, and guided mentorship
• Our research is public, and much of it is work you may already know: this team identified the supply chain compromise of the axios npm package, uncovered a new Contagious Interview campaign hiding DPRK malware inside SVG images, and published in-depth analyses of the TCLBANKER banking trojan and the PHANTOMPULSE RAT, each one paired with protections that shipped to customers
• If you have a passion for taking apart what adversaries build, and would enjoy the challenge of getting that understanding into customers' hands quickly, join our growing team!
• Reverse engineer malware nobody has documented yet. Take apart obfuscated and packed samples across Windows, macOS, and Linux, and recover how they communicate, configure themselves, and stay hidden
• Operate global data systems to identify and mitigate threats. Work through data from millions of endpoints to surface the activity worth investigating, build the campaign context that tells customers who is targeting them, and push mitigation back out across the fleet
• Turn every discovery into a shipped protection, and the tooling that scales it. Author the signatures that stop what you find, and build the automation and AI-assisted workflows that make the next investigation faster than the last
• Build your public research reputation. Publish on Elastic Security Labs, release tools and detection artifacts to our public GitHub repositories, and present at conferences. We encourage a public persona and the relationships in the research community that come with it
• Collaborate across Elastic Security. Your discoveries become the rules and models that neighboring teams build and ship, and you will work with those teams directly on shared threat intelligence and detection engineering projects
• Help lead the team's technical direction. Take point on investigations that run for months, raise the bar in review, and mentor researchers earlier in their careers

Benefits

• Toast to your health: Fully paid health coverage for you and your family, in many locations.
• Craft your calendar: Flexible location and schedule for most roles.
• Create space for you: Distributed by design workforce, plus generous number of vacation days each year.
• Embrace parenthood: Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave, plus generous family formation benefits.
• Give back your time: 40 hours each year to use toward volunteering with organizations and causes you're passionate about.
• Amplify your impact: Double your charitable giving — we match donations up to $1500 USD (or local currency equivalent).

You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomesYARA authorship and hunting at scale. You write signatures that hold up against the next variant, and you can find a weak signal in a very large telemetry datasetPython development experience for research tooling and automation, plus the ability to read C and C++. Malware arrives in Rust, Go, and NodeJS too, so you are willing to learn a new runtime when a sample demands itProven ability to seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or scrum teams based on dynamic business priorities6+ years of professional experience reverse engineering malware and researching adversary tradecraft, static and dynamic, across multiple executable formats (PE, ELF, Mach-O) and architectures (x86-64, ARM), including obfuscated and packed code that defeats automated toolingTechnical writing ability. You can turn a long investigation into a clear, public analysis that other defenders can act onWorking knowledge of the fundamentals: Windows and Linux internals, network protocols including HTTP and TLS, and enough applied cryptography to recognize what is protecting a configuration blobA collaborative mentality, an eagerness to learn new skills and emerging technologies, and a passion for protecting the world's data from attack!Vulnerability research or novel technique discovery, with a track record of responsible disclosureParticipation in CTFs such as FLARE-ON or NetWarsStanding in the community: maintaining an open-source security tool, speaking at conferences (e.g., Black Hat, DEF CON, CODE BLUE, Virus Bulletin), or an established publication recordAttribution tradecraft, including joint investigations with external intelligence partners and platforms such as MISP or OpenCTIBehavioral detection engineering beyond signatures, or applying machine learning to malware classificationFamiliarity with the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana) and Elastic Security