Staff Product Security Engineer, Secure Design (Kernel and Virtualization)

About the role

Dive in and do the best work of your career at DigitalOcean. Journey alongside a strong community of top talent who are relentless in their drive to build the simplest scalable cloud. If you have a growth mindset, naturally like to think big and bold, and are energized by the fast-paced environment of a true industry disruptor, you’ll find your place here. We value winning together—while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world.

We’re looking for a Staff Product Security Engineer who is passionate about partnering with engineers to assess and mitigate the security risk of our virtualization stack.

You'll own the security risk posture for our virtualization stack. You'll get there by building the frameworks the org uses to reason about hypervisor risk — systematic threat models that surface risks, shared rubrics for assessing their impact and likelihood, and clear ways of communicating them to security, kernel, virtualization, and provisioning teams. From there, you'll own the response: designing and proposing defense-in-depth mitigations and driving their implementation.

As a member of the Product Security team, you will report to the Manager of Secure Design. Our Secure Design team enables DigitalOcean to build secure-by-design products. We leverage strong relationships with both product teams and the rest of security engineering to be successful. The team’s scope is primarily focused on reviewing early-stage decisions, developing threat models, scaling impact via automation, curating security patterns, authoring security guidance, training, and championing security initiatives.

What you’ll do:

Propose and implement mitigations and defense-in-depth to threats discovered through threat modeling the virtualization stack (90%)

- Provide deep technical expertise in systems architecture, kernel security features and network architecture to build out a threat model for our virtualization stack

- Identify the trade-offs of different solutions and recommend the efficient design to achieve both functional goals and security requirements. We do not deliver mandates; we work alongside cross-functional partners to find mutually beneficial solutions.

- Collaborate with development teams to implement remediations and defense in depth to protect DigitalOcean’s customers’ workloads.

Cultivate and promote a security culture (10%)

- Mentor software engineering teams in security best practices.

- Help oversee our vulnerability management program (we call it security debt).

- Help DigitalOcean engineers understand how security events impact them. Do they need to worry about the next Redfish or Copy Fail CVEs? How does RetBleed impact DigitalOcean’s fleet?

What you’ll add to DigitalOcean:

Required qualifications:

- Deep familiarity with at least one kernel security feature (ex: AppArmor, SELinux, Landlock, etc.)