Senior SAFE Lab Cybersecurity Engineer

Rochester Institute of Technology; Fort Lee (NJ); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Rochester Institute of Technology seeks a Senior SAFE Lab Cybersecurity Engineer to lead offensive security assessments and adversary-emulation campaigns for corporate clients. You will supervise student teams, author final reports, and brief executives on findings.

You’ll drive realistic, instrumented adversary emulation as the core product of the Center’s fee-for-service training and assessment work, with opportunities to shape both academic and industry engagements.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years in offensive security (pentest/red team/adversary emulation).
• Minimum 2 years designing or executing adversary emulation, red team, purple team, or cyber exercise scenarios.
• 3+ years client-facing consulting, including scoping and SOW input.
• Demonstrated experience leading engagements and mentoring junior engineers.
• Experience delivering written assessment reports and verbal briefings directly to clients.
• Experience designing and deploying system/network environments using OpenStack and infrastructure-as-code (Ansible/Terraform).
• Experience delivering cyber exercises, wargames, or hybrid simulations for external audiences.
• Experience evaluating AI-enabled security products under adversarial conditions.
• Experience with cloud and identity attack paths in Azure/Entra ID, AWS, or Google Cloud.
• Experience with OT/ICS or energy-grid networks and protocols.
• Experience creating models or digital twins of tested networks using IaC or simulators.
• At least two years managing or maintaining enterprise IT infrastructure.
• Certifications such as CISSP, GCIH, GCFA, or PMP.
• Existing security clearance or ability to obtain one.

Responsibilities

• Leads client-facing security testing and evaluation in the SAFE Lab: penetration testing and ethical hacking for diverse environments, translating findings into reports and briefings for non-technical executives and technical practitioners.
• Converts assessment findings and threat intelligence into staged, observable attack campaigns driving immersive exercises and client engagements.
• Acts as exercise control during live delivery, adjusting tempo and injects while clients are present, ensuring technical integrity of engagements.
• Leads teams of student employees and adjunct consultants and documents work so a qualified engineer can reproduce engagements independently.
• Reports to the Director of the Cyber Range and Training Center within RIT's ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute and can lead engagements with low-touch oversight.

Skills

Offensive security

Penetration testing

Red teaming

Adversary emulation

Client-facing consulting

Report writing

OpenStack

IaC (Ansible/Terraform)

Threat intelligence

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

Splunk Enterprise Security

CrowdStrike

OSCP/OSEP/GPEN

Ansible

Terraform

OpenStack

Job description

Position Highlights

The Senior SAFE Lab Cybersecurity Engineer leads offensive security assessments and adversary-emulation campaigns for corporate clients. They produce reports and provide briefings to clients. They are responsible for supervising teams of student employees and adjunct consultants.

The Senior Cyber SAFE Engineer is the Cyber Range and Training Center's principal offensive security practitioner and the technical author of the adversary activity on which the Center's commercial, academic, and research programs depend. Realistic, instrumented, repeatable adversary emulation is the core product of the Center's fee-for-service training and assessment work.

Key responsibilities include:

• leads client-facing security testing and evaluation in the SAFE Lab: penetration testing and ethical hacking of enterprise, government, military, and cyber-physical environments, and the translation of those findings into written reports and briefings that non-technical executives and technical practitioners can both act on.
• converts assessment findings and current threat intelligence into staged, observable attack campaigns that drive the Center's immersive exercises, competitions, and client engagements -- and ensures that those campaigns generate the telemetry participants must be able to find, in the tools and formats those participants actually use.

The Senior SAFE Lab Cybersecurity Engineer serves as exercise control during live delivery, adapting scenario tempo and injects in real time while paying clients are in the room, and is accountable for the technical integrity of engagements that carry contractual delivery obligations. The position also leads teams of student employees and industry-expert adjunct consultants and is expected to document its work to a standard that allows another qualified engineer to reproduce any engagement independently.

This position reports to the Director of the Cyber Range and Training Center within RIT's ESL Global Cybersecurity Institute and is expected to lead engagements independently with low-touch oversight.

Preferred experience:

• A minimum of 5 years of professional experience in offensive security, including penetration testing, red teaming, or adversary emulation against production or production-representative environments.
• A minimum of 2 years of experience designing or executing adversary emulation, red team, purple team, or cyber exercise scenarios in which the activity was instrumented and observed by a defending audience.
• At least 3 years of client-facing consulting experience, including scoping, statement-of-work input, and level-of-effort estimation for fee-for-service engagements.
• Demonstrated experience leading engagements and directing the work of other technical contributors.
• Demonstrated experience delivering written assessment reports and verbal briefings directly to paying or sponsoring clients.
• Experience designing and deploying system/network environments using Openstack and infrastructure-as-code (ansible/terraform/etc).
• Experience designing or delivering cyber exercises, wargames, tabletop-to-technical hybrids, or competition infrastructure for external audiences.
• Detection engineering experience: authoring SIEM correlation content, EDR detections, or purple-team validation of detective controls.
• Experience with Splunk Enterprise Security, CrowdStrike, or comparable commercial detection stacks in a client-aligned configuration.
• Experience applying AI and large language model tooling to offensive security or exercise workflows - including agentic tooling and Model Context Protocol integrations - together with sound judgment regarding validation, data handling, and disclosure.
• Experience evaluating AI-enabled security products under realistic adversarial conditions and reporting evidence-based adoption guidance.
• Experience with cloud and identity attack paths in Azure/Entra ID, AWS, or Google Cloud.
• Experience with operational technology, IC S/SCADA, or energy-grid networks, devices, and protocols.
• Experience creating models or digital twins of tested networks and deploying them using infrastructure as code such as Ansible or Terraform, or simulation platforms such as Unreal Engine or MATLAB Simulink.
• At least two years of experience managing or maintaining enterprise IT infrastructure (servers, storage, network, or security).
• Experience mentoring students or junior engineers, and prior involvement in academic or government research projects related to cybersecurity.
• Certifications such as CISSP, GCIH, GCFA, or PMP.
• Existing security clearance or the ability to obtain one.

Dedication to learning and advancing your skills.

Preferred Skills

• Deep expertise in penetration testing tools and methodologies, with a current certification such as OSCP, OSEP, GPEN, GXPN, CRTO, or equivalent, or the ability to obtain one within six months of hire.
• Demonstrated ability to compromise and operate within Windows Active Directory environments, including credential