Senior Offensive Security Engineer, Automotive - CA, Santa Clara, United States
$184,000 - $356,500 USD yearly
Originally posted 12 August 2026 by the employer.
Discover and evaluate vulnerabilities in automotive OS kernels, Hypervisor, and boot ROMs.
About the role
This role involves discovering and evaluating vulnerabilities in sophisticated automotive operating systems, focusing on low-level systems. You will build automation and tooling to scale vulnerability discovery and insights.
What you'll do
- Discover and evaluate vulnerabilities on source code and binaries, focusing on OS kernels, Hypervisor, boot ROMs, firmware, and hardware.
- Develop and build automation for security pipelines, fuzzing infrastructure, AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, automated code inspection, and code conversion.
- Own tool development from prototype to production for use across the software organization.
What you'll need
- 7+ years of programming experience, particularly with C/C++.
- B.S. or equivalent experience in Computer Science or a related field.
- Strong low-level systems security background: OS internals, kernels, hypervisors, firmware, or hardware.
- Experience with embedded software engineering.
- Experience building automated security tooling: fuzzers, sanitizers, static/dynamic analysis at source and binary levels.
- Knowledge of current operating system architectures and security frameworks, with a particular focus on Linux.
- Understanding of x86 and ARM architecture.
- Hands-on experience developing and building agentic AI systems: multi-agent orchestration, tool-use pipelines, and applying them to automate security or engineering workflows.
Nice to have
- Involvement in CTF competitions, bug bounty contributions, or published security research.
- Extensive experience with formal methods or memory-safe languages (e.g. Ada/SPARK, Rust, TLA+, Lean) for hardening low-level code and architecture.
- RISC-V knowledge.
Skills: low-level systems security, OS kernels, Hypervisor, boot ROMs, firmware, fuzzing
This role has been open 65 days — slightly above the 59-day median for Hardware Security Engineering roles.
Hardware Security Engineering · Hardware Security
|
Open roles in category
185
|
Median days open
59 d
|
Median salary
$224k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (185 roles · 46 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 28 | 185 |
| Median days open | 33 d | 59 d (−26 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $224k |
Skills observed across this category: low-level systems security, OS kernels, Hypervisor, boot ROMs, firmware, fuzzing
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 28 open roles · median 33 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 23 open roles · median 107 d
- Qualcomm · 17 open roles · median 121 d
- Arm Holdings · 13 open roles · median 101 d
- STMicroelectronics · 11 open roles · median 15 d
- AMD · 8 open roles · median 57 d
How we counted: 185 open Hardware Security Engineering (Hardware Security) roles from 46 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 17 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there. Figures refresh nightly.