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 Monitoring and Threat Detection
Covers the principles and practical design of security monitoring, logging, and threat detection across environments including cloud scale infrastructure. Topics include data collection strategies, centralized logging and storage, security information and event management architecture, pipeline and ingestion design for high volume and high velocity data, retention and indexing tradeoffs, observability and telemetry sources, and alerting and tuning to reduce noise. Detection techniques include signature based detection, anomaly detection, indicators of compromise, behavioral detection, correlation rules, and threat intelligence integration. Also covers evaluation metrics such as false positives and false negatives, detection coverage and lead time, incident escalation, playbook integration with incident response, automation and orchestration for investigation and remediation, and operational concerns such as scalability, cost, reliability, and privacy or compliance constraints.
Detection Response and Forensics Architecture
Assess how the candidate designs systems that enable detection investigation and recovery. Topics include audit logging strategy and retention, immutable logging and chain of custody, real time detection pipelines, correlation and alerting design, security information and event management, endpoint detection and response patterns, playbooks and runbooks for incident response, forensic evidence preservation and tooling, and operational considerations such as scalability, privacy and compliance. Candidates should explain how architecture decisions enable or hinder effective response and root cause analysis.
Google Cloud Platform Identity Architecture
Assess design of Identity and Access Management across Google Cloud Platform. Topics include patterns for service accounts and short lived credentials, human user federation and single sign on using OpenID Connect, attribute based access control and least privilege, identity lifecycle and governance, delegated access models across projects and organizations, access certification, and auditability. Expect discussion of automation for credential rotation, compromise containment, and cross project trust models.
Content Protection and Digital Rights Management
Design and operational practices for protecting media assets and enforcing licensing through digital rights management. Core areas include secure content packaging and encryption for streaming and download playback license acquisition and authorization flows license server and key management lifecycle including secure key storage and rotation client and device attestation playback integrity secure content delivery network integration forensic watermarking offline protection and anti piracy controls, plus consideration of performance availability and compliance constraints.
Threat Modeling and Secure System Design
Applying threat modeling and structured problem solving to secure system design. Candidates should be able to decompose complex security challenges by identifying business context, critical assets, threat actors, attack surfaces, and compliance requirements. Topics include threat modeling methodologies, attacker capability and motivation analysis, risk assessment and prioritization, selection of mitigations and compensating controls, and evaluation of trade offs among security, usability, cost, and performance. Candidates should also be able to produce implementation and monitoring plans that address scalability and maintainability and to clearly explain and justify design choices and residual risk to stakeholders.
Enterprise Security Architecture Experience
Describe concrete hands on experience designing and implementing enterprise security frameworks. Candidates should provide specific examples of security standards and architectures they developed, projects where they applied layered security, decisions they made about identity and access management, network segmentation, encryption, monitoring, and incident response, and measurable outcomes such as reduced risk or improved compliance. Expect questions about cross team coordination, stakeholder engagement, trade offs made during implementation, lessons learned, and how prior work influenced organizational security posture.
Encryption and Key Management
Covers cryptography fundamentals and practical key lifecycle management for data in transit and at rest. Expect questions on symmetric versus asymmetric encryption, commonly used algorithms and standards, TLS fundamentals, authenticated encryption, envelope encryption, cloud key management services, hardware security modules, key rotation and revocation strategies, access controls and auditing for keys, integration with secrets stores, and operational trade offs around performance and complexity. Candidates should be able to explain mitigation strategies for key compromise and patterns for securely handling encryption in distributed systems.
Incident Response Forensics and Crisis Management
Covers the full spectrum of preparing for, detecting, investigating, containing, and recovering from security and operational incidents, plus managing their business and regulatory impact. Candidates should understand the incident response lifecycle including detection and monitoring, triage and prioritization, containment, eradication, recovery, and post incident review. This includes forensic evidence preservation and analysis practices such as secure collection of logs and artifacts, tamper proofing, chain of custody, immutable storage, timeline building, memory and disk examination fundamentals, and legal and regulatory considerations for evidence. It also covers designing infrastructure and tooling to enable rapid response at scale: logging and telemetry architecture, data retention policies, secure evidence storage, automated collection and alerting, integration with runbooks and response workflows, and readiness of teams and playbooks. Finally, it addresses crisis and stakeholder management skills: incident command and coordination across engineering, security, product, legal, customer support and executive stakeholders, internal and external communications and status updates, customer and regulator notification procedures, postmortem and lessons learned processes, tabletop exercises and drills, and leadership and decision making under pressure.
Secure Coding and Code Review
Principles, techniques, tooling, and processes that prevent security vulnerabilities through developer practices and structured review. Topics include input validation and sanitization, output encoding, bounds checking and memory safety, safe application programming interface usage, defensive programming, secure authentication and authorization patterns, secure error handling and logging without leaking secrets, secrets management and avoiding hard coded credentials, correct use of cryptographic primitives and libraries, secure deserialization, dependency and supply chain management, and threat modeling at the code level. Also covers code review practices focused on security such as checklists and threat oriented heuristics, automation and integration with static application security testing and dynamic analysis, pull request policies, triage and remediation workflows, balancing review thoroughness with development velocity, developer security training and awareness programs, metrics for review effectiveness, and strategies to embed security into the software development lifecycle.