About the Role

As our Red Team Engineer, you will attack our own products the way a capable adversary would: spacecraft, ground stations, cloud command-and-control software, and the pipelines and factory processes that produce them. You will run our internal assessments, lead the outside firms we bring in, build testing tools that keep up the pressure between assessments, and bring an attacker's perspective into design reviews while there is still time to change the design.

This is a hands-on engineering role, not an audit, compliance, or security policy role.

About the Team

Apex builds spacecraft, the flight software that runs them, the ground systems and cloud software used to command them, and the test equipment and emulators used to develop them. In this industry a security failure can cost an entire mission, so we try to find the weaknesses before anyone else does.

Product Security is a small team with a big footprint. You would be its second core member, working directly with the Product Security Architect and alongside security engineers embedded in our flight software, ground software, and development infrastructure teams.

Responsibilities

• Plan and run adversary emulation against our spacecraft, flight software, ground systems, and development pipeline, using SPARTA and MITRE ATT&CK to structure the work.

• Look for attack paths that cross system boundaries, such as a ground-system compromise that leads to control of a spacecraft, instead of testing each component in isolation.

• Lead our third-party security assessments: set the scope, give the testers the environments and engineering support they need, and bring their results together with our own.

• Design and build our fuzzing and automated testing capability, including agent-driven test generation, so testing runs with every release and not just once a year.

• Reverse engineer firmware and protocols, analyze embedded hardware interfaces, and review how cryptography is implemented.

• Join design reviews and technical trade-offs to show how a proposed design could be attacked before it is built.

• Co-chair our product security incident response process, helping triage reported vulnerabilities and coordinate fixes.

• Work with engineering teams to fix the root causes of what you find and help other engineers learn to think like attackers.

Requirements

• US Citizenship

• 3-10 years of hands-on offensive security experience in penetration testing, red teaming, exploit development, or vulnerability research.

• Track record of building your own tools, harnesses, or automation when nothing off the shelf would do the job.

• Experience combining several smaller weaknesses into a realistic attack path.

• Solid fundamentals in operating systems, networking, and applied cryptography, and comfort reading and debugging code you have not seen before.

• Ability to own a technical project from start to finish with little direction.

• Clear communication, whether walking an engineer through a fix or explaining risk to leadership.

Preferred

• Experience with embedded or cyber-physical systems in space, aerospace, automotive, robotics, industrial/OT, medical devices, or autonomous vehicles.

• Experience building fuzzing harnesses for embedded or protocol targets, and working with RTOS, embedded Linux, or hardware interfaces such as JTAG, SWD, SPI, I2C, or CAN.

• Experience with AI-assisted security testing.

• Familiarity with RF and satellite command links, GNSS spoofing and jamming, or ground station architecture.

• Experience scoping or directing the work of outside assessment firms.

• Public work such as CVEs, published research, conference talks, or CTF results, or space security training such as the Hack The Box Satellite Exploitation track.

• Eligibility for a U.S. security clearance. An active clearance is not required, and the role focuses on unclassified work.

Other info

• Reports to: Product Security Architect.

• Level: Senior individual contributor. We will also consider strong mid-level candidates with deep hands-on experience.

#LI-RC1

What We Offer For Full-time Employees:

• Shared upside: Receive equity in Apex, letting you benefit from the work you create