Spacecraft Red Team Engineer: Adversary Emulation

Digitailor; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity in Apex

Healthcare coverage

PTO 15–20 days + holidays

401(k) matching

Job summary

Apex is seeking a Senior Red Team Engineer to probe spacecraft, ground systems, and the development pipeline. You will lead adversary emulation, coordinate external assessments, and build testing tools to keep pressure on releases.

This hands-on role collaborates with the Product Security Architect and embedded security engineers to uncover weaknesses early in design and implementation, influencing cryptography and incident response practices.

Qualifications

• 3-10 years of hands-on offensive security experience in penetration testing, red teaming, exploit development, or vulnerability research.
• Track record of building your own tools, harnesses, or automation when nothing off the shelf would do the job.
• Experience combining several smaller weaknesses into a realistic attack path.
• Solid fundamentals in operating systems, networking, and applied cryptography, and comfort reading code you have not seen before.

Responsibilities

• Plan and run adversary emulation against spacecraft, flight software, ground systems, and development pipeline using SPARTA and MITRE ATT&CK.
• Lead third-party security assessments: set scope, provide environments, and consolidate results.
• Design and build fuzzing and automated testing capability with agent-driven test generation.
• Reverse engineer firmware and protocols; analyze embedded hardware interfaces; review cryptography implementations.
• Join design reviews to show how a proposed design could be attacked before build.
• Co-chair product security incident response, triage vulnerabilities, coordinate fixes.
• Work with engineering teams to fix root causes and teach attackers' mindset.

Skills

Offensive security

Penetration testing

Red teaming

Exploit development

Vulnerability research

Tool development

Cryptography fundamentals

Code reading

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

Tools

Fuzzing harnesses

Embedded systems

RTOS

JTAG

CAN

Job description

Apex is seeking a Senior Red Team Engineer to probe spacecraft, ground systems, and the development pipeline. You will lead adversary emulation, coordinate external assessments, and build testing tools to keep pressure on releases.

This hands-on role collaborates with the Product Security Architect and embedded security engineers to uncover weaknesses early in design and implementation, influencing cryptography and incident response practices.