Senior Vulnerability Engineer

XYZ Venture Capital; Washington; On-site; USD 191,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits package

Equity grants

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Anduril Industries, a defense technology company, is seeking a Vulnerability Engineer to advance hardware and software security across embedded systems and firmware. You will design research plans, build tooling, and collaborate with hardware and software teams to turn findings into actionable mitigations.

The role emphasizes practical, mission-driven security outcomes, with expectations to contribute reproducible artifacts, reports, and advanced testing across lab environments.

Qualifications

• Experience discovering vulnerabilities in firmware, applications, network services, embedded Linux systems, drivers, protocols, or hardware-adjacent systems.
• Proficiency with one or more programming languages used for vulnerability research and tooling, such as Python, C, C++, Rust, or Go.
• Experience with fuzzing, harness development, crash triage, exploitability analysis, source-code review, binary analysis, or dynamic instrumentation.
• Ability to reason about memory corruption, logic flaws, authentication and authorization failures, unsafe parsing, concurrency issues, insecure update flows, and trust-boundary failures.
• Hands-on familiarity with Linux, embedded systems, networking, debugging, and common security research tooling.
• Ability to communicate vulnerability impact, reproduction steps, and mitigation options clearly to both research and engineering audiences.
• Demonstrated bias toward practical, mission-enabling security outcomes rather than purely theoretical findings.
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Find novel vulnerabilities in software, firmware, embedded systems, protocols, update paths, device interfaces, and hardware/software integration boundaries.
• Design and execute vulnerability research plans that combine code review, reverse engineering, fuzzing, emulation, dynamic instrumentation, hardware analysis, and adversarial testing.
• Build custom fuzzers, harnesses, emulators, instrumentation, triage workflows, and proof‑of‑concept tooling to turn research hypotheses into reproducible findings.
• Analyze root cause, exploitability, operational impact, and mitigation options for discovered vulnerabilities.
• Partner with reverse engineers, product security engineers, embedded software engineers, hardware engineers, and systems teams to validate findings and drive practical remediation.
• Write clear technical reports that include evidence, reproduction steps, exploitability assessment, impact, mitigations, and follow‑on research opportunities.
• Design hardware‑in‑the‑loop vulnerability experiments that combine software exploitation, protocol analysis, physical interfaces, and lab instrumentation.
• Develop tooling to automate experiment orchestration, device interaction, data collection, crash triage, and vulnerability reproduction.

Skills

Vulnerability research

Firmware analysis

Python

C/C++

Linux

Communication

Security clearance

Tools

Ghidra

IDA Pro

Binary Ninja

QEMU

Frida

GDB

LLDB

Job description

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company with a mission to transform U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology. By bringing the expertise, technology, and business model of the 21st century’s most innovative companies to the defense industry, Anduril is changing how military systems are designed, built and sold. Anduril’s family of systems is powered by Lattice OS, an AI-powered operating system that turns thousands of data streams into a realtime, 3D command and control center. As the world enters an era of strategic competition, Anduril is committed to bringing cutting‑edge autonomy, AI, computer vision, sensor fusion, and networking technology to the military in months, not years.

ABOUT THE TEAM

Anduril Cyber is hiring a Vulnerability Engineer to discover novel vulnerabilities in hardware and software systems and turn that research into rigorous technical artifacts. The role is focused on original vulnerability discovery across embedded systems, firmware, applications, protocols, hardware/software boundaries, and system integrations.

ABOUT THE JOB

• Find novel vulnerabilities in software, firmware, embedded systems, protocols, update paths, device interfaces, and hardware/software integration boundaries.
• Design and execute vulnerability research plans that combine code review, reverse engineering, fuzzing, emulation, dynamic instrumentation, hardware analysis, and adversarial testing.
• Build custom fuzzers, harnesses, emulators, instrumentation, triage workflows, and proof‑of‑concept tooling to turn research hypotheses into reproducible findings.
• Analyze root cause, exploitability, operational impact, and mitigation options for discovered vulnerabilities.
• Partner with reverse engineers, product security engineers, embedded software engineers, hardware engineers, and systems teams to validate findings and drive practical remediation.
• Write clear technical reports that include evidence, reproduction steps, exploitability assessment, impact, mitigations, and follow‑on research opportunities.
• Design hardware‑in‑the‑loop vulnerability experiments that combine software exploitation, protocol analysis, physical interfaces, and lab instrumentation.
• Develop tooling to automate experiment orchestration, device interaction, data collection, crash triage, and vulnerability reproduction.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Strong experience discovering vulnerabilities in firmware, applications, network services, embedded Linux systems, drivers, protocols, IoT devices, or hardware‑adjacent systems.
• Proficiency with one or more programming languages used for vulnerability research and tooling, such as Python, C, C++, Rust, or Go.
• Experience with fuzzing, harness development, crash triage, exploitability analysis, source‑code review, binary analysis, or dynamic instrumentation.
• Ability to reason about memory corruption, logic flaws, authentication and authorization failures, unsafe parsing, concurrency issues, insecure update flows, and trust‑boundary failures.
• Hands‑on familiarity with Linux, embedded systems, networking, debugging, and common security research tooling.
• Ability to communicate vulnerability impact, reproduction steps, and mitigation options clearly to both research and engineering audiences.
• Demonstrated bias toward practical, mission‑enabling security outcomes rather than purely theoretical findings.
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.
• Experience evaluating vulnerabilities across embedded protection mechanisms such as secure boot, firmware update paths, key storage, memory protection, and debug interface controls.
• Comfort working with lab‑based vulnerability validation using hardware interfaces, protocol analyzers, debuggers, or instrumented test setups.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience finding vulnerabilities in boot chains, firmware update mechanisms, device identity systems, cryptographic integrations, anti‑tamper mechanisms, or programmable‑logic‑backed systems.
• Experience with advanced vulnerability research techniques such as coverage‑guided fuzzing, symbolic execution, differential testing, fault injection, protocol state modeling, or hardware‑in‑the‑loop testing.
• Familiarity with reverse‑engineering tools such as Ghidra, IDA Pro, Binary Ninja, QEMU, Frida, gdb/lldb, or comparable frameworks.
• Background in embedded, aerospace, robotic, RF, or cyber‑physical systems and the ways their threat models differ from conventional enterprise software.
• Track record of producing high‑quality vulnerability research artifacts, internal tooling, conference‑quality writeups, CVEs, or comparable technical outputs.
• Experience applying side‑channel analysis, fault injection, black‑box testing, or hardware‑assisted fuzzing to embedded systems.
• Experience with RF protocols, cryptographic protocol analysis, FPGA/SoC security, signal processing, or board‑level vulnerability assessment.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, mentorship, or ownership of complex vulnerability research efforts from hypothesis through reproducible technical artifact.

Salary

$191,000 — $253,000 USD

The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary offer may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Highly competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Anduril's total compensation package. Additionally, Anduril offers top‑tier benefits for full‑time employees, including:

Benefits

At Anduril, we invest in our people. Our comprehensive, competitive benefits package (available at little to no cost to employees) ensures you’re supported in health, recovery, and whatever comes next. For more information, Explore Our Benefits.