Security Engineering & Operations Topics
Operational security practices, secure systems implementation, threat modeling, penetration testing, vulnerability assessment, and security operations at production scale. Covers network security, endpoint security, secure architecture implementation, incident response mechanics, and security automation. Distinct from Security & Compliance (which addresses governance, compliance frameworks, and policy) and from Security Research & Innovation (which addresses novel techniques and research contributions).
Security and Data Privacy
Covers design and operational practices for protecting systems and user data. Candidates should be able to explain authentication and authorization models including token based approaches and role based access control, encryption at rest and encryption in transit, key management and secrets rotation, secure application programming interface design and input validation, audit logging and security monitoring, data governance and privacy controls, compliance with data protection regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act, data minimization and anonymization techniques, threat modeling and vulnerability management, incident response and breach notification procedures, and trade offs between security, performance and developer productivity.
Authentication and Authorization
Cover core concepts and implementation trade offs for securing backend services. Candidates should demonstrate understanding of token based authentication and server side session strategies, how to securely issue and rotate credentials, techniques for revocation and refresh, secure storage of secrets, use of third party identity providers, common threat mitigations such as cross site request forgery protection and secure transmission practices, and design patterns for role based and attribute based access control. Interviewers will evaluate the candidate ability to reason about scalability and revocation trade offs and to design secure application programming interface permission checks.
Security Hardening and Data Protection
Covers principles and practices for protecting sensitive information and strengthening system security across the stack. Topics include authentication and authorization design such as token based authentication and federated identity, role based access control and attribute based access control, and secure session management. Encryption and hashing fundamentals are required: differences between encryption and hashing, symmetric encryption using standards such as Advanced Encryption Standard, asymmetric encryption using algorithms such as Rivest Shamir Adleman, transport layer security protocols for data in transit, and encryption of data at rest. Key management and lifecycle practices are essential, including secure key generation, storage using key management services or hardware security modules, certificate management, secure key rotation, and backup and recovery of cryptographic keys. Secrets management covers secure storage and retrieval of credentials, API keys, and secrets, plus strategies to avoid accidental exposure such as logging redaction and environment separation. Data protection policies and techniques include data classification, minimization, masking, tokenization, retention and deletion policies, and privacy compliance considerations such as General Data Protection Regulation and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. Implementation and operational concerns include secure coding and input validation to prevent injection, protection against common cryptographic and implementation flaws, secure random number generation, rate limiting and distributed denial of service mitigation, monitoring and alerting for suspicious activity, incident response planning, and balancing security controls with developer experience and usability.
Post Incident Analysis and Playbook Development
Your approach to post-incident reviews: conducting blameless post-mortems, identifying root causes, documenting lessons learned, and updating incident response playbooks. How you systematically eliminate similar incidents from recurring. Examples of playbooks or processes you've developed based on past incidents.
Authentication and Security Basics
Covers core application security concepts such as authentication and authorization models, token based authentication using JSON Web Tokens, session management, secure password storage with hashing and salting, transport layer security using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, cross origin request handling, common injection and client side attacks such as structured query language injection and cross site scripting, input validation and output encoding, role based access control, and basic practices for secrets management and secure logging. Candidates should explain trade offs and simple designs that reduce attack surface and enable safe operation.
Authentication and Access Control
Comprehensive coverage of methods, protocols, design principles, and practical mechanisms for proving identity and enforcing permissions across systems. Authentication topics include credential based methods such as passwords and secure password storage, Multi Factor Authentication, one time passwords, certificate based and passwordless authentication, biometric options, federated identity and single sign on using Open Authorization, OpenID Connect and Security Assertion Markup Language, and service identity approaches such as Kerberos and mutual Transport Layer Security. Covers token based and session based patterns including JSON Web Token and session cookies, secure cookie practices, token lifecycle and refresh strategies, token revocation approaches, refresh token design, and secure storage and transport of credentials and tokens. Authorization and access control topics include role based access control, attribute based access control, discretionary and mandatory access control, access control lists and policy based access control, Open Authorization scopes and permission modeling, privilege management and the principle of least privilege, and defenses against privilege escalation and broken access control. The description also addresses cryptographic foundations that underlie identity systems including symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, public key infrastructure and certificate lifecycle management, secure key management and rotation, and encryption in transit and at rest. Common threats and mitigations are covered, such as credential stuffing, brute force attacks, replay attacks, session fixation, cross site request forgery, broken authentication logic, rate limiting, account lockout strategies, secrets management, secure transport, and careful authorization checks. Candidates should be able to design authentication and authorization flows for both user and service identities, evaluate protocol and implementation trade offs, specify secure lifecycle and storage strategies for credentials and tokens, and propose mitigations for common failures and attacks.