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).
Enterprise Cloud Security and Compliance
Designing enterprise grade cloud security and compliance architectures: network segmentation and reference topologies such as hub and spoke, virtual private cloud design, security groups and network access control lists, private connectivity options and virtual private networks, identity governance and scalable policy management, secrets and key management, encryption at rest and in transit, centralized logging and audit trails, threat detection and security monitoring, incident response and forensics, and embedding compliance controls for standards such as SOC two, HIPAA, and PCI DSS. Also includes applying common enterprise security patterns and evaluating trade offs between patterns in large organizations.
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 and Framework Design
Designing comprehensive security architecture and enterprise scale security frameworks for large organizations. Topics include layered security and defense in depth applied at enterprise scale, zero trust and microsegmentation strategies, identity and access management at scale, network segmentation and secure network architecture, encryption strategies for data at rest and in transit, secrets and key management, audit logging and telemetry placement, incident response integration, backup and disaster recovery planning, and platform and infrastructure hardening. Candidates should demonstrate how to align security architecture with business goals, translate an architectural vision into a prioritized roadmap and governance model, reason about scalability and interoperability, justify trade offs between security and developer velocity, and design automation and orchestration to enable secure operations at scale.
Security Architecture Principles and Fundamentals
Core principles and foundational knowledge for designing secure systems and architectures. Candidates should understand defense in depth, zero trust, least privilege, separation of duties, secure by design and fail secure thinking. Topics include attack surface reduction, secure defaults, threat modeling methodologies and how to translate high level principles into concrete controls. Coverage includes access control models such as role based and attribute based approaches, authentication and authorization architectures, secrets and key management basics, classification of controls as preventive, detective, or corrective, and integration of controls across identity, network, host, application, and data layers. Expect discussion of how to prioritize security requirements, make trade offs between security, performance, cost, and usability, and incorporate security requirements into the system development lifecycle.
Cloud Security and Compliance
Focuses on designing, implementing, testing, and validating secure cloud environments across providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Topics include Identity and Access Management, network security and segmentation, encryption strategies for data at rest and data in transit, secrets management, secure multi tenant design patterns, compliance frameworks and controls, common cloud misconfigurations, cloud native attack vectors, and approaches to penetration testing and security validation for cloud infrastructure and managed services. Candidates should be able to reason about secure architecture decisions, threat models, detection and response strategies, and how compliance requirements affect cloud design.
Security Architecture Patterns and Tradeoffs
Reusable security patterns and the decision making required to select and apply them. Candidates should be able to propose authentication and authorization models, role design and least privilege patterns, secure inter service and application programming interface communication patterns, encryption and key management approaches, secrets management and rotation practices, secure configuration baselines and hardening patterns, and assume compromise design approaches. Coverage includes selection criteria for patterns, control placement, and the trade offs between security, performance, cost, complexity, and operational burden. Candidates should also be able to communicate risk and security benefits to non technical stakeholders and know when to escalate to specialist security or cryptography experts.
Confidentiality Integrity and Availability
Foundational information security framework that focuses on three core goals: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Confidentiality is about protecting information from unauthorized access and disclosure and includes real world examples such as data leaks, unauthorized access to sensitive records, and privacy violations. Typical controls for confidentiality include encryption for data at rest and in transit, strong authentication and authorization, access control policies, key management, data classification, and least privilege. Integrity is about ensuring information remains accurate and unaltered by unauthorized actors and covers incidents such as data tampering, unauthorized edits, and corruption. Controls for integrity include cryptographic hashes and digital signatures, checksums, tamper detection, versioning and immutability, input validation, audit logging, and integrity verification processes. Availability is about ensuring systems and data are accessible and functioning when needed and covers incidents such as denial of service attacks, infrastructure failures, and capacity exhaustion. Controls for availability include redundancy, replication, load balancing, autoscaling, caching, content delivery networks, failover and disaster recovery planning, backups, maintenance windows, monitoring, and incident response. Candidates should be able to explain these pillars, give concrete examples of breaches and mitigations, describe how to choose and implement technical controls, and reason about trade offs between goals for different systems and business contexts. Assessment often covers threat modeling and risk assessment to prioritize controls, mapping security requirements to service level objectives and service level agreements, defining recovery time objective and recovery point objective, designing for resilience, and communicating security trade offs to stakeholders. Familiarity with security design patterns such as defense in depth, principle of least privilege, secure by design, and zero trust models is useful when applying these principles in architecture and operations.
Cloud Identity and Access Management
Comprehensive coverage of identity and access management in cloud environments. Candidates should understand identity models and authentication and authorization patterns, design and implement role based access control and attribute based access control, author and scope policies, apply permission boundaries and the principle of least privilege, and manage service identities and workload identities for virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions. Topics include federated identity and single sign on, multi factor authentication, service accounts and cross account trust, ephemeral credentials and credential rotation, secrets and key management using vaults and hardware security modules, encryption key lifecycle, avoidance of hard coded credentials, policy as code and automation with infrastructure as code, auditing and access logging for detection and compliance, and integration with enterprise identity providers. Interview scenarios assess policy design, least privilege exercises, troubleshooting misconfigured permissions, and trade offs between cloud native managed services and custom solutions.
Cloud Security Fundamentals
Core security principles and operational practices for cloud computing environments. Topics include the shared responsibility model and delineation of provider and customer responsibilities, identity and access management basics and least privilege, secure configuration and common cloud misconfigurations, data protection including encryption at rest and encryption in transit, key and secrets management basics, network security and segmentation, secure API design, audit logging, monitoring and alerting, cloud security posture management and automated misconfiguration detection, incident response and forensic readiness in cloud environments, governance, compliance and data residency considerations, strategies to reduce blast radius and prevent privilege escalation, and common cloud specific threats and mitigations. Candidates should be able to discuss trade offs, how to apply controls across major cloud providers, detection and mitigation strategies, and practical examples of securing cloud workloads.