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

DigitalOcean is seeking a Staff Product Security Engineer to own the security risk posture of its virtualization stack. The role develops threat models, proposes and drives defense-in-depth mitigations, and partners with engineering teams on remediation. It also promotes security best practices and supports vulnerability management.

Responsibilities:

• 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?

Requirements:

• Deep familiarity with at least one kernel security feature (ex: AppArmor, SELinux, Landlock, etc.)
• Capable of assessing and understanding the performance implications of code changes to virtualization stacks (especially in Qemu and KVM), built from hands-on experience
• A record of partnering with internal engineering teams to tackle security problems across an entire stack with empathy and creativity
• Ability to clearly communicate security topics and vulnerability classes (e.g. memory corruption, privilege escalation, TOCTOU, etc) and ability to provide actionable direction to product teams
• Working knowledge of modern development concepts (virtualized environments, containerization, continuous integration + delivery)
• 5+ years of writing systems level code (embedded systems, kernel, assembly or similar)
• Experience guiding software teams on secure architecture design
• Written code for an embedded system (raspberry pi, arduino, etc)
• Experience building or reviewing threat models and ability to craft malicious user, attacker, and abuse/misuse cases
• An understanding of patches and mitigations for hardware side-channel attacks
• Familiarity with object oriented and functional programming concepts, particularly with languages such as Go, Rust, or C