Senior Cloud & Container Penetration Engineer

Socket.dev; Florham Park (NJ); On-site; USD 113,000 - 238,000; Full time

Job summary

CAC I is recruiting a Senior Penetration Engineer to push the envelope in cloud and container security. You will hunt for vulnerabilities in distributed systems, Kubernetes internals, and OCI runtimes, using static/dynamic analysis and fuzzing to expose exploitable paths.

Candidates should thrive on technical ambiguity and communicate complex findings clearly to engineering teams. The role emphasizes Python-based automation, disassembly tool usage, and collaboration on national cybersecurity

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience in vulnerability research, software exploitation, or low‑level engineering.
• Proven track record of finding vulnerabilities in distributed systems, virtualization layers, or container runtimes.
• Experience with Kubernetes security architecture and service mesh implementations (Istio, Linkerd).
• Detailed understanding of Linux kernel internals, specifically namespaces, cgroups, and the container execution model.
• Strong command of Python for scripting and automation of research tasks.
• Background in cloud provider security (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and underlying hypervisor technology.
• Must be a US Citizen and able to obtain/maintain a security clearance

Responsibilities

• Investigate edge‑case behaviors in containerized environments and low‑level system initialization logic to reveal hidden attack surfaces.
• Conduct deep‑dive research into OCI runtimes (runc, crun) and Linux kernel primitives (namespaces, cgroups, eBPF) to identify breakout and privilege escalation paths.
• Develop custom tools and scripts (primarily in Python3) to automate research workflows, protocol decoding, and memory analysis.
• Perform static and dynamic analysis on compiled binaries (Go, Rust, C++) using IDA Pro, Ghidra, or Binary Ninja to map undocumented logic and potential security issues.
• Build and maintain custom fuzzing harnesses (e.g., AFL++, libFuzzer) to stress‑test gRPC interfaces, service mesh components, and microservices.
• Utilize concolic execution tools (e.g., Angr, Manticore) to automate the discovery of complex execution paths and bypass security checks.
• Document findings clearly and translate technical complexity into actionable reports for security and engineering teams.

Skills

Vulnerability research

Kubernetes security

Python scripting

Cloud security

Low-level engineering

Go

Rust

Tools

IDA Pro

Ghidra

Binary Ninja

AFL++

libFuzzer

Angr

Manticore

GDB

Job description

CAC I is recruiting a Senior Penetration Engineer to push the envelope in cloud and container security. You will hunt for vulnerabilities in distributed systems, Kubernetes internals, and OCI runtimes, using static/dynamic analysis and fuzzing to expose exploitable paths.

Candidates should thrive on technical ambiguity and communicate complex findings clearly to engineering teams. The role emphasizes Python-based automation, disassembly tool usage, and collaboration on national cybersecurity