SoC Offensive Security Staff Engineer - Austin, Texas, United States
$198,100 - $268,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 7 July 2026 by the employer.
About the role
The SoC Offensive Security Staff Engineer applies an attacker's mindset to identify design and integration-level vulnerabilities across pre-silicon and post-silicon environments. Working within the Security Research and Response team in Arm's Architecture and Technology Group, you will evaluate SoC and chiplet micro-architectures, conduct firmware security analysis, and perform adversarial assessments.
What you'll do
- Perform adversarial security analysis of SoC and chiplet micro-architectures across pre-silicon and post-silicon environments. - Review architecture, micro-architecture, system-level specifications, security assumptions, RTL implementations, and firmware components throughout the development lifecycle. - Demonstrate vulnerability impact by developing Proofs of Concept (PoCs), exploits, and security demonstrations. - Investigate multi-stage and cross-component attack chains beyond those captured in threat models or standard verification activities. - Apply automation, scripting, and AI-assisted techniques to support vulnerability discovery, specification analysis, test generation, and triage. - Participate in design reviews, security discussions, and hackathons to develop threat scenarios and improve security models and mitigations.
What you'll need
- Strong knowledge of SoC architecture and IP integration, including threat modeling standalone IPs and subsystems. - Demonstrated experience conducting adversarial assessments, such as PoCs, exploits, CTFs, or published research. - Practical experience with SystemVerilog RTL, UVM-based validation environments, and HW Dev IDEs, including adapting verification environments for negative and offensive testing. - Hands-on lab experience setting up development and testing platforms, delivering security evaluations, and validating findings. - Firmware security analysis experience with projects such as UEFI, uBoot, MCUBoot, or Trusted Firmware. - Experience with security-focused specifications and standards such as Caliptra, DICE, or related attestation and hardware root-of-trust standards.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with hardware interface standards, including PCIe, CXL, SMBus, SPI, I2C, and UART. - Familiarity with Arm AMBA interconnect protocols: AXI, CHI, CXS, APB, ATB, and LPI. - Experience with formal proof tools and approaches for hardware security. - Experience with TEEs and their hardware building blocks, including the TCB of a confidential VM. - Experience with hardware fuzzing in pre-silicon and post-silicon environments. - Experience with software exploitation techniques or reverse engineering for hardware, firmware, or microarchitecture. - Contributions to open standard bodies or participation in security-focused special interest groups.
Skills: SoC security, chiplet micro-architectures, adversarial assessments, firmware security analysis, hardware root-of-trust
This role has been open 105 days — well above the 59-day median for Hardware Security Engineering roles.
Hardware Security Engineering · Hardware Security
|
Open roles in category
182
|
Median days open
59 d
|
Median salary
$224k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Arm Holdings | All employers we track in this specialty (182 roles · 43 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 13 | 182 |
| Median days open | 105 d | 59 d (+46 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $224k |
Skills observed across this category: SoC security, chiplet micro-architectures, adversarial assessments, firmware security analysis, hardware root-of-trust
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 29 open roles · median 35 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 23 open roles · median 90 d
- Qualcomm · 17 open roles · median 125 d
- Arm Holdings (this employer) · 13 open roles · median 105 d
- STMicroelectronics · 12 open roles · median 16 d
- AMD · 8 open roles · median 61 d
How we counted: 182 open Hardware Security Engineering (Hardware Security) roles from 43 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 21 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.