Adversarial Security Test Engineer

Job Description

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.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

Adversarial Security Testing

• 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.

Exploitability Analysis & Offensive Research

• 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.

AI-Assisted Adversarial Security Engineering

• 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.

Security Automation & Tooling

• 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.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• 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.

Qualifications

Required:

• 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.

Preferred:

• 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.

Additional Information

Sandisk is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and grooming standards), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), gender (including a person’s gender identity, gender expression, and gender-related appearance and behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth), age, national origin, sexual orientation, medical condition, marital status (including domestic partnership status), physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, protected medical and family care leave, Civil Air Patrol status, military and veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. We also prohibit harassment of any individual on any of the characteristics listed above. Our non-discrimination policy applies to all aspects of employment. We comply with the laws and regulations set forth in the "Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal” poster. Our pay transparency policy is available here.

Sandisk thrives on the power and potential of diversity. As a global company, we believe the most effective way to embrace the diversity of our customers and communities is to mirror it from within. We believe the fusion of various perspectives results in the best outcomes for our employees, our company, our customers, and the world around us. We are committed to an inclusive environment where every individual can thrive through a sense of belonging, respect and contribution.

Sandisk is committed to offering opportunities to applicants with disabilities and ensuring all candidates can successfully navigate our careers website and our hiring process. Please contact us at [email protected] to advise us of your accommodation request. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.

Based on our experience, we anticipate that the application deadline will be 09/22/2026 (3 months from posting), although we reserve the right to close the application process sooner if we hire an applicant for this position before the application deadline. If we are not able to hire someone from this role before the application deadline, we will update this posting with a new anticipated application deadline.

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Compensation & Benefits Details

• An employee’s pay position within the salary range may be based on several factors including but not limited to (1) relevant education; qualifications; certifications; and experience; (2) skills, ability, knowledge of the job; (3) performance, contribution and results; (4) geographic location; (5) shift; (6) internal and external equity; and (7) business and organizational needs.
• The salary range is what we believe to be the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting.  We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and this range is only applicable for jobs to be performed in California, Colorado, New York or remote jobs that can be performed in California, Colorado and New York.  This range may be modified in the future.
• You will be eligible to participate in Sandisk's Short-Term Incentive (STI) Plan, which provides incentive awards based on Company and individual performance.  Depending on your role and your performance, you may be eligible to participate in our annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program, which consists of restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents, pursuant to the terms of the LTI plan. Please note that not all roles are eligible to participate in the LTI program, and not all roles are eligible for equity under the LTI plan. RSU awards are also available to eligible new hires, subject to Sandisk's Standard Terms and Conditions for Restricted Stock Unit Awards.
• We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid vacation time; paid sick leave; medical/dental/vision insurance; life, accident and disability insurance; tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts; employee assistance program; other voluntary benefit programs such as supplemental life and AD&D, legal plan, pet insurance, critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity; tuition reimbursement; transit; the Applause Program, employee stock purchase plan, and the Sandisk's Savings 401(k) Plan.
• Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole discretion, consistent with the law.