Lead Security Research Engineer

About the Role

Join a dynamic team that combines innovation and collaboration to support critical global missions. As a Lead Security Research Engineer, you will spearhead key initiatives around vulnerability research, exploit assessment, and the creation of vulnerability signatures within the Qualys security platform. This role involves leading efforts to pinpoint, validate, and prioritize security threats grounded on actual exploitability, enabling clients to differentiate theoretical vulnerabilities from confirmed attack vectors.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead research projects involving vulnerabilities across operating systems, databases, enterprise applications, cloud platforms, container systems, and network equipment.
• Investigate newly disclosed, N-day, and actively exploited security flaws.
• Drive the creation of exploit-focused validation methods to verify real-world vulnerability exploitability.
• Review and ensure the quality and consistency of technical designs, methods, and code in vulnerability research.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Product teams to influence security content strategy and product roadmaps.
• Create secure validation processes emulating attacker behavior without compromising production environments.
• Analyze root causes of vulnerabilities, attack pathways, exploitation conditions, and possible business effects.
• Mentor and support Security Research Engineers in vulnerability and exploit analysis and signature crafting.
• Design validation frameworks to assess the effectiveness of existing security controls like WAFs, firewalls, EDRs, IPS, and other protective mechanisms.
• Lead automation efforts across vulnerability research, exploit verification, content creation, testing, and deployment workflows.
• Set and uphold best practices, coding standards, and quality benchmarks for vulnerability signature development.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in a pertinent field.
• Over 8 years of hands-on involvement in vulnerability research, penetration testing, detection engineering, or broader security research.
• In-depth knowledge of networking protocols including TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SSH, SMTP, DNS, SSL/TLS, and current web protocols.
• Advanced skills in vulnerability evaluation, exploit creation, and attack methodologies.
• Comprehensive understanding of operating systems, databases, web technologies, cloud setups, and enterprise infrastructures.
• Strong programming abilities.
• Experience in packet-level analysis, network diagnostics, and reverse engineering of protocols.
• Familiarity with OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, common attack strategies, and current threat actor tactics.
• Excellent technical writing, verbal communication, and presentation skills.
• Proven leadership in managing projects and mentoring technical teams.

Additional Desired Skills

• Knowledge of scripting languages including Lua (preferred), Bash, or Python.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Oracle, etc.
• Proficiency in regular expression usage.
• Understanding container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with vulnerability scanning, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and other security tools.
• Professional certifications such as OSCP, CISSP, or SANS GIAC are advantageous.