Senior Staff Security Engineer, Distributed Systems
Originally posted 21 September 2026 by the employer.
About the role
As a Senior Staff Security Engineer, Distributed Systems, you will build security controls and services across on-prem and cloud clusters. You will drive hardening efforts across the cluster stack, covering bare metal, virtualized, and k8s containerized systems.
What you'll do
- Define core security requirements for distributed systems environments, spanning secure boot configurations to workload identity in k8s pods.
- Partner with platform, infrastructure, networking, and hardware teams to identify gaps and deliver end-to-end solutions.
- Develop threat models for each part of the cluster stack, outlining trust boundaries and the interplay between first and third-party mechanisms.
- Work with engineering leads and architects to bake secure design in from the beginning.
- Balance engineering outcomes with security controls to enable secure delivery.
- Document security posture and strategy for technical and nontechnical audiences from both 1p and 3p perspectives.
What you'll need
- 8-10 years of experience with heterogenous compute environments, kubernetes hardening, and general networked system security.
- 10+ years of experience with HPCs (high performance clusters).
- Hands-on engineering abilities in on-prem and cloud environments.
- Ability to work in fragmented ecosystems, hardening modern k8s deployments and bare metal instances.
- Strong written communication skills with the ability to explain security concepts to non-specialists.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, and distributed compute systems.
Skills: distributed systems, secure boot, Kubernetes hardening, threat models, HPCs
More semiconductor jobs: Sunnyvale jobs
This role has been open 39 days — well below the 51-day median for Hardware Security Engineering roles.
Hardware Security Engineering · Hardware Security
|
Open roles in category
171
|
Median days open
51 d
|
Category median salary (all employers)
$220k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Cerebras | All employers we track in this specialty (171 roles · 39 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 4 | 171 |
| Median days open | 49 d | 51 d (−2 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $220k |
Skills observed across this category: distributed systems, secure boot, Kubernetes hardening, threat models, HPCs
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 30 open roles · median 43 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 22 open roles · median 111 d
- Qualcomm · 17 open roles · median 115 d
- Arm Holdings · 11 open roles · median 87 d
- Synopsys · 9 open roles · median 16 d
- STMicroelectronics · 8 open roles · median 33 d
How we counted: 171 open Hardware Security Engineering (Hardware Security) roles from 39 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 31 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.