Senior Security Research Engineer, SONAR - Elastic

About the Role

SONAR is the adversary research team within Elastic Security. We discover novel adversary behavior through malware reverse engineering, threat hunting, and vulnerability research. We turn every discovery into protections that ship to customers and share our work publicly through Elastic Security Labs. We are looking for a Senior Security Research Engineer to take on our most complex analysis work and help set the technical direction of the team.

What You Will Be Doing

• Reverse Engineering: Analyze undocumented malware, including obfuscated and packed samples across Windows, macOS, and Linux.
• Threat Mitigation: Operate global data systems to identify threats, build campaign context, and push mitigations across the fleet.
• Product Impact: Author signatures and build AI-assisted workflows to scale detection capabilities.
• Public Research: Publish findings on Elastic Security Labs, release tools to GitHub, and present at industry conferences.
• Collaboration: Work across Elastic Security teams to share threat intelligence and detection engineering projects.
• Leadership: Lead long-term investigations and mentor researchers earlier in their careers.

What You Bring

• 6+ years of professional experience in malware reverse engineering and adversary tradecraft.
• Proficiency in static and dynamic analysis across multiple executable formats (PE, ELF, Mach-O) and architectures (x86-64, ARM).
• Strong Python development skills for research tooling; ability to read C and C++.
• Expertise in YARA authorship and hunting at scale.
• Solid understanding of Windows/Linux internals, network protocols (HTTP/TLS), and applied cryptography.
• Proven technical writing ability to communicate complex investigations clearly.
• Experience using AI to accelerate development and debug complex systems.

Benefits

• Competitive pay with stock program participation.
• Company-matched RRSP (up to 6%).
• Flexible locations and schedules.
• Generous annual vacation policy.
• Financial donation matching and volunteer time off (up to 40 hours).
• 16 weeks minimum of parental leave.
• Comprehensive health coverage.