Senior Security Research Engineer
Qualys, Inc.2 hours ago
Pune, IndiaSenior
Responsibilities
- Analyze vulnerabilities down to affected code paths, trigger conditions, exploitable primitives, and patch changes.
- Develop proof-of-concept exploits in laboratory environments to establish reachability, reliability, and real-world impact.
- Build non-harmful vulnerability checks for customer hosts using distinguishing signals instead of harmful payloads.
- Assess mitigation bypasses involving ASLR, DEP/NX, stack canaries, CFI, RELRO, sandboxing, and modern hardware mitigations.
- Design compiler, platform, defense-in-depth, and other mitigations for vulnerability classes and individual bugs.
- Adapt public offensive and detection tooling while distinguishing detection logic, payloads, and bypass-critical components.
- Create matched vulnerable and patched lab environments for exploitation, regression testing, and mitigation validation.
- Document exploitation reasoning, verdict logic, residual risk, known gaps, and implementation tradeoffs.
Requirements
- At least 3 years of vulnerability research experience.
- BE, B.Tech, or MCA degree, preferably in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
- Practical native and binary exploitation experience.
- Command of memory-corruption classes including stack and heap overflows, use-after-free, double-free, type confusion, integer overflows, off-by-one, and format-string bugs.
- Experience with debugger and disassembler/decompiler workflows using tools such as gdb with pwndbg or GEF, WinDbg, IDA, Ghidra, or Binary Ninja.
- Experience with pwntools or an equivalent tool.
- Fluency in vulnerability classes, root-cause analysis, and variant analysis.
- Proficiency in at least one of Python, C/C++, Go, or Rust.
- Strong technical writing skills for documenting exploitation reasoning, verdict logic, residual risk, and known gaps.
- Working fluency with AI and LLM tools such as Claude Code.
- Preferred: published CVE research, exploit development, coordinated disclosure, fuzzing, program analysis, reverse engineering, source-code review, detection or scanning platform authoring, CTF experience, and reproducible lab orchestration with containers or virtual machines.