Security & Compliance Topics
Governance, compliance frameworks, regulatory requirements, compliance implementation, and compliance-driven risk management. Covers compliance frameworks (SOX, GDPR, HIPAA, FCPA, etc.), regulatory interpretation, compliance control design, audit and control effectiveness evaluation, and compliance process management. For operational security implementation and technical threat mitigation, see Security Engineering & Operations.
Regulatory Frameworks and Standards
Thorough knowledge of the major regulatory, privacy, and security frameworks and standards that organizations use to define controls and demonstrate conformance. Candidates should be able to explain the purpose, scope, and typical control categories of frameworks such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology cybersecurity framework and related publications, International Organization for Standardization 27001 for information security management and International Organization for Standardization 27701 for privacy management, Service Organization Controls type two, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act and the California Privacy Rights Act, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies, and the Center for Internet Security critical controls. Interviewers may probe the difference between mandatory regulation and voluntary standards, prescriptive versus principles based approaches, how frameworks map to business risk drivers, how to map controls across multiple frameworks, and how audit assessment and certification processes operate in practice. Candidates should also be able to describe common gaps, typical remediation strategies, and how to build evidence and documentation to support audits and assessments.
Security Culture and Awareness
Covers strategies and practice for creating and sustaining a security minded organization where security is a shared responsibility. Topics include designing and running awareness programs and campaigns, embedding secure practices into the software development life cycle and daily workflows, translating policies into observable behaviors, and fostering psychological safety so people raise concerns and report issues. Includes practical initiatives such as role based training, phishing simulations, tabletop exercises, onboarding flows, manager and executive engagement, incentives and recognition programs, and tooling or process changes that make secure choices easier. Also covers measurement and evaluation approaches such as baseline and follow up surveys, behavior and compliance metrics, incident trends, adoption rates, training completion, and return on investment calculations, plus change management techniques used to drive sustained behavior change across teams and business units.
Compliance and Data Protection Regulations
Understanding of regulatory requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, CCPA, PCI-DSS), implementing controls to meet compliance obligations, data retention policies, audit requirements, and working with compliance and legal teams.
Risk Management and Governance
Ongoing practices and organizational mechanisms for managing risk over the lifecycle of a program or enterprise. Topics include building and maintaining risk registers, defining ownership and escalation paths, determining risk tolerance and acceptance criteria, periodic reassessment and monitoring, reporting to leadership, and governance workflows for mitigation tracking and decision escalation. Candidates should be able to describe how to prioritize risks, when and how to escalate to engineering or executive leadership, how to document mitigation progress, and how to operationalize risk policies and controls to ensure issues are tracked until closure.
Communicating Security to Stakeholders
Ability to translate security concepts, findings, incidents, and trade offs into business language for non technical audiences. This includes presenting security risks and threat models in terms of business impact, explaining severity and likelihood, recommending mitigations and investments, and persuading executives or other stakeholders to prioritize security actions. Candidates should show how they remove technical jargon, frame trade offs between security functionality and cost, and communicate incident details, remediation steps, and residual risk clearly.
Supply Chain and Third Party Risk
Encompasses identification, assessment, and mitigation of security risks introduced by external vendors, suppliers, and infrastructure dependencies across the technology supply chain. Candidates should be able to design and execute vendor security assessment frameworks and questionnaires, perform risk tiering and prioritization, and integrate vendor controls into system architecture and procurement practices. Key areas include software bill of materials and dependency mapping, supply chain integrity controls such as code signing and secure build pipelines, vulnerability and patch management for third party components, and evaluation of managed services and cloud provider dependencies. The topic also covers contractual requirements such as service level agreements and audit rights, vendor onboarding and offboarding controls, continuous monitoring and telemetry for vendor posture, incident response coordination with third parties, remediation and escalation processes, key performance indicators and governance for a vendor risk program, and automation and tooling to scale assessments and monitoring. Interviewers may ask candidates to design a comprehensive vendor risk management program, address supply chain attack vectors, and align third party security practices with compliance obligations and organizational risk appetite.
Compliance Landscape Assessment and Controls
Practical skills for assessing which compliance obligations apply to an organization and translating those obligations into technical and operational controls. Candidates should be able to perform scoping based on industry, geography, and customer base; map requirements to policies, processes, and technical controls; design evidence collection and audit trails; and describe assessment and remediation workflows. This topic covers compliance program operations, control frameworks, control testing, compliance monitoring, and how to demonstrate compliance to internal and external auditors.
Security Strategy and Roadmap
Covers the candidate ability to define, articulate, and operationalize an enterprise security strategy, long term vision, and multi year roadmap. Core skills include setting security goals and risk tolerance, aligning security priorities with broader business objectives and product roadmaps, designing governance and accountability models, and defining metrics and key performance indicators to measure security outcomes. Candidates should be able to translate high level principles into concrete programs, controls, processes, and team structures, and to justify prioritization and sequencing of investments across tooling, process, and people while balancing security rigor with development velocity and user experience. Interviewers may probe how the candidate engaged executives, engineering teams, product managers, legal and compliance partners, and boards; how they secured funding and sponsorship; and examples of initiatives, decisions, and measurable impact driven by the security vision. The scope also includes forward looking program evolution such as how penetration testing and security assessment practices are changing with artificial intelligence and machine learning, adoption of zero trust architectures and serverless platforms, and long term considerations such as quantum computing. Emphasis is on strategic trade offs between immediate operational threats and multi year maturity planning, vendor and tooling selection, resource and capability building, and positioning security as an enabling function rather than a blocker.
Audit Readiness and Logging
Designing systems to be audit ready and producing reliable tamper resistant audit trails. Topics include immutable audit logging approaches, secure log collection and aggregation pipelines, indexing and search for operational and forensic analysis, secure storage and access controls for logs, retention and deletion policies, log integrity and chain of custody, privacy aware redaction and retention design, integration with security information and event management systems, monitoring and alerting driven by logs, generating evidence and control mappings for third party audits, and operational practices for audit preparation and response.