Security Research Engineer

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

• Reverse engineer malware nobody has documented yet. Take apart obfuscated and packed samples across Windows, macOS, and Linux, and recover how they communicate, configure themselves, and stay hidden.
• Operate global data systems to identify and mitigate threats. Work through data from millions of endpoints to surface the activity worth investigating, build the campaign context that tells customers who is targeting them, and push mitigation back out across the fleet.
• Turn every discovery into a shipped protection, and the tooling that scales it. Author the signatures that stop what you find, and build the automation and AI-assisted workflows that make the next investigation faster than the last.
• Build your public research reputation. Publish on Elastic Security Labs, release tools and detection artifacts to our public GitHub repositories, and present at conferences. We encourage a public persona and the relationships in the research community that come with it.
• Collaborate across Elastic Security. Your discoveries become the rules and models that neighboring teams build and ship, and you will work with those teams directly on shared threat intelligence and detection engineering projects.
• Help lead the team's technical direction. Take point on investigations that run for months, raise the bar in review, and mentor researchers earlier in their careers.

• 6+ years of professional experience reverse engineering malware and researching adversary tradecraft, static and dynamic, across multiple executable formats (PE, ELF, Mach-O) and architectures (x86-64, ARM), including obfuscated and packed code that defeats automated tooling.
• Python development experience for research tooling and automation, plus the ability to read C and C++. Malware arrives in Rust, Go, and NodeJS too, so you are willing to learn a new runtime when a sample demands it.
• YARA authorship and hunting at scale. You write signatures that hold up against the next variant, and you can find a weak signal in a very large telemetry dataset.
• Working knowledge of the fundamentals: Windows and Linux internals, network protocols including HTTP and TLS, and enough applied cryptography to recognize what is protecting a configuration blob.
• Technical writing ability. You can turn a long investigation into a clear, public analysis that other defenders can act on.
• You have a proven track record of using AI to accelerate development, debug complex systems, and optimize code, while still owning the final outcomes.
• Proven ability to seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or scrum teams based on dynamic business priorities.
• A collaborative mentality, an eagerness to learn new skills and emerging technologies, and a passion for protecting the world's data from attack!

• Compensation for this role is in the form of base salary. This role does not have a variable compensation component. The typical starting salary range for new hires in this role is listed below. These ranges represent the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting.