Spacecraft Security Engineer - Red Team

Apex Space, Inc.; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Shared equity opportunity

Best-in-class healthcare

Comprehensive PTO

401(k) match

8 weeks parental leave

Catered lunch and snacks

Vibrant community

High-end desk setup

Playa Vista office

Meaningful impact

Job summary

Apex Space, Inc. is seeking a Senior Red Team Engineer in Playa Vista, CA, to attack spacecraft, flight software, ground systems, and pipelines. You will run internal assessments, lead external testers, and build tools to pressure-test designs before launch.

The role is hands-on, with collaboration across flight software, ground software, and development infrastructure teams. You will co-lead incident response, triage vulnerabilities, and fix root causes alongside engineers.

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 and debugging code you have not seen before.
• Ability to own a technical project from start to finish with little direction.
• Clear communication, whether walking an engineer through a fix or explaining risk to leadership.

Responsibilities

• Plan and run adversary emulation against spacecraft, flight software, ground systems, and development pipeline, using SPARTA and MITRE ATT&CK to structure the work.
• Look for attack paths that cross system boundaries, such as a ground-system compromise that leads to control of a spacecraft, instead of testing each component in isolation.
• Lead third-party security assessments: set the scope, provide environments and engineering support, and integrate results with our own.
• Design and build fuzzing and automated testing capability, including agent-driven test generation, so testing runs with every release.
• Reverse engineer firmware and protocols, analyze embedded hardware interfaces, and review how cryptography is implemented.
• Join design reviews and show how a proposed design could be attacked before it is built.
• Co-chair product security incident response process, triage vulnerabilities and coordinate fixes.
• Work with engineering teams to fix root causes and help others think like attackers.

Skills

Offensive security

Tool development

Attack paths

OS & networking fundamentals

Project ownership

Communication

Job description

Apex Space, Inc. is seeking a Senior Red Team Engineer in Playa Vista, CA, to attack spacecraft, flight software, ground systems, and pipelines. You will run internal assessments, lead external testers, and build tools to pressure-test designs before launch.

The role is hands-on, with collaboration across flight software, ground software, and development infrastructure teams. You will co-lead incident response, triage vulnerabilities, and fix root causes alongside engineers.