Adversarial Security Test Engineer

Sandisk•Milpitas, CA

About The Position

Sandisk’s Product Security Engineering & Assurance (PSEA) organization is seeking highly motivated Adversarial Security Test Engineers to strengthen the security resilience of SanDisk firmware-driven products and storage platforms. This role focuses on attacker-informed security testing of embedded systems, firmware, and storage technologies through exploitability analysis, offensive security testing, attack-path validation, fuzzing, reverse engineering, and adversarial assessment. The ideal candidate possesses a strong offensive security mindset and enjoys challenging assumptions, uncovering weaknesses, validating the effectiveness of implemented security controls, and leveraging modern tooling — including AI-assisted techniques — to improve the scale, speed, and depth of adversarial security analysis.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Cybersecurity, or related technical field.
5+ years of experience in offensive security, embedded systems security, firmware security, product security testing, or related disciplines.
Strong experience with: penetration testing, fuzzing, reverse engineering, exploitability analysis, debugging low-level systems, vulnerability research.
Strong understanding of: secure boot, firmware architectures, embedded systems security, cryptography fundamentals, attack surface analysis, hardware/firmware trust boundaries.
Programming or scripting experience in Python, C/C++, or related languages.

Nice To Haves

Experience with SSDs, storage controllers, flash technologies, embedded systems, or silicon products strongly preferred.
Experience with reverse engineering, fuzzing, exploit development, dynamic instrumentation, or firmware analysis tools (e.g., Ghidra, IDA Pro, Frida, AFL, libFuzzer, or similar technologies).
Experience leveraging AI/LLM technologies to accelerate vulnerability research, reverse engineering, adversarial testing, or offensive security workflows.
Familiarity with agentic workflows, security automation, or AI-assisted code and binary analysis techniques is a plus.
Experience with hardware or firmware security testing strongly preferred.
Strong offensive security mindset and attacker intuition.
Strong analytical, technical problem-solving, and reverse engineering skills.
Curiosity and willingness to experiment with emerging AI-assisted approaches for offensive security research.
Strong technical communication and documentation capabilities.
Ability to balance creativity, rigor, and responsible security research practices.
Strong judgment in balancing product risk, customer commitments, and business priorities.

Responsibilities

Conduct adversarial security testing against firmware, embedded systems, and storage products to identify realistic attack paths and security weaknesses.
Evaluate attack surfaces including: firmware update mechanisms, secure boot implementations, authentication and authorization workflows, debug interfaces (UART/JTAG), manufacturing and RMA pathways, cryptographic implementations, provisioning and lifecycle transitions.
Simulate realistic attacker techniques to evaluate product resilience, exploitability, and effectiveness of implemented security controls.
Perform manual and automated security testing to identify vulnerabilities in firmware, embedded systems, host tooling, and product ecosystems.
Assess exploitability of discovered vulnerabilities and determine realistic product risk.
Develop proof-of-concept exploits and attack simulations to validate severity and remediation priorities.
Conduct root cause analysis and help engineering teams understand technical weaknesses, exploit chains, and attack paths.
Research emerging attack techniques relevant to firmware, embedded systems, storage controllers, hardware/firmware interfaces, and supply-chain attack surfaces.
Leverage AI/LLM-assisted techniques to improve adversarial testing effectiveness, vulnerability discovery, attack-path analysis, and offensive security research.
Explore and develop AI-assisted workflows for: fuzzing optimization, reverse engineering acceleration, vulnerability hypothesis generation, code and binary analysis, exploitability assessment, attack simulation, adversarial security research automation.
Evaluate emerging AI-enabled offensive and defensive security techniques and apply them pragmatically to product security testing.
Contribute to scalable, repeatable adversarial testing methodologies that responsibly leverage AI capabilities to improve depth and efficiency of security analysis.
Develop repeatable testing methodologies, tooling, and automation for adversarial security validation.
Build scripts, frameworks, and testing utilities to improve testing scale, repeatability, and effectiveness.
Utilize reverse engineering, fuzzing, exploit development, dynamic instrumentation, and firmware analysis tools (e.g., Ghidra, IDA Pro, Frida, AFL, libFuzzer, or similar technologies) to support offensive security testing.
Help integrate adversarial testing approaches into product security readiness and assurance activities where practical.
Partner closely with: Firmware Engineering, Platform Security, Product Engineering, Validation teams, Product Security Assurance, PSIRT, External security assessment partners.
Translate security findings into technically actionable remediation guidance and durable product improvements.
Clearly communicate security findings, exploitability assessments, and residual risks to technical and business stakeholders.