Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure Security)

Quora; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Quora is seeking a Security Engineer to join the newly formed Security Engineering Team, protecting Quora and Poe from security problems by building robust protections across products, infrastructure, and people.

You will partner with engineering to review cloud architecture, establish threat models, and develop tools to monitor and harden environments, while driving security policy and automation across CI/CD pipelines.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience securing large-scale cloud environments, especially AWS.
• Experience building secure IaC pipelines with Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Understand IAM, network segmentation, and VPC design, with strong monitoring/logging practices.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes security, serverless architectures, or related domains is a bonus.

Responsibilities

• Support Quora and Poe products with security engineering standards.
• Partner with engineering teams to review cloud and compute architecture designs.
• Establish threat models for cloud and compute roadmaps to identify risks.
• Develop or adopt open-source tools to monitor and harden cloud infrastructure and OS.
• Write automation to support threat detection, incident containment, and access management.
• Conduct initial incident triage and participate in incident response.

Skills

Software engineering

Cloud infrastructure security

Automation & secure development

Container security

Linux security

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

AWS IAM

Kubernetes security

Job description

• This role will be supporting both our Quora and Poe products
• You will be a key member of the newly created Security Engineering Team, with a mission to keep Quora safe from security problems by building robust protections around our products, infrastructure and people
• Our small engineering team works on challenging problems every day. We have a culture that’s rooted in constantly learning and improving, and our engineers are encouraged to think big and experiment with new ideas
• Partner with engineering teams to review cloud and compute architecture design changes
• Establish threat models for cloud and compute paved roads to identify security risks
• Develop or adopt open-source tools to monitor and harden our cloud Infrastructure, harden our OS, develop security logging pipelines and detect intrusions
• Apply your expert knowledge of security best practices for AWS and Kubernetes to inform remediations and the team’s control roadmap
• Drive the definition and implementation of security policies and monitor in conformance to the policies
• Write code for automations that support security requirements like threat detection, incident containment, and network access management
• Conduct initial incident triage; determine scope, urgency, and potential impact of security incidents; participate in the incident response process

Sweat The Right Details: you thrive in understanding the details but will also know to ruthlessly prioritize the critical issuesOwnership: you are outcome focused and can deftly navigate obstacles, decompose complexities, manage your time and can communicate your vision to peers and managementRight-Size The Solution: you recognize guidelines and framework do not always fit the problem and know how to adjust the solution for scalability not always at-scaleAn Ideal Candidate Would Be a capable software engineer while also spiking in at least one of the following domain expertise:Cloud Infrastructure Security: You have hands-on experience securing large-scale cloud environments, particularly with AWS. You are passionate about building secure infrastructure-as-code (IaC) pipelines using tools like Terraform or CloudFormationYou understand IAM policies, network segmentation, and VPC design and have a thorough grasp of monitoring and logging in cloud-native environmentsYou are skilled in identifying misconfigurations, mitigating risks, and driving remediation processes. Bonus points if you’ve implemented security in Kubernetes clusters or serverless architecturesAutomation and Secure Development Practices: You believe in “security as code” and are skilled at automating security processesYou can develop and integrate security tools into CI/CD pipelines to ensure secure code delivery. Tools like SAST, DAST, and dependency scanning are part of your daily toolkit, and you have experience integrating them into workflows to catch vulnerabilities earlyYou also advocate for secure coding practices and are skilled at mentoring teams to write resilient, secure applicationsBeyond that, you know that root does not mean root and are passionate about container security, POSIX Capabilities, SECCOMP and have a favorite flavor of LSM. In your spare time, you love playing around with OSQuery and eBPFLinux/System Security: You are well versed in AWS infrastructure security but also are passionate about scalability, reliability and operational rigorProduct Security (nice-to-have): Not a requirement, but a real plus: experience building secure web applications and APIs, with a working grasp of the OWASP Top 10 and common vulnerabilities such as XSS, CSRF, and SQL injection. It complements the infrastructure security focus of this role and helps when partnering with product teamsWe encourage all candidates who share a passion for growing the world’s knowledge, even those who may not strictly meet all the preferred requirements, to apply, as we know that a diverse range of perspectives can have a significant impact on our products and our culture