Senior Product Security Engineer, Secure Design – Kernel and Virtualization

DigitalOcean

Senior Product Security Engineer at DigitalOcean responsible for security risk assessments and mitigations in virtualization stack. Collaborating with engineers to develop secure-by-design products within a dynamic team environment.

Posted 6/26/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $140,000 - $175,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AssemblyGoRust

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Propose and implement mitigations and defense-in-depth to threats discovered through threat modeling the virtualization stack (90%)
Provide deep technical expertise in systems architecture, kernel security features and network architecture to build out a threat model for our virtualization stack
Identify the trade-offs of different solutions and recommend the efficient design to achieve both functional goals and security requirements
Collaborate with development teams to implement remediations and defense in-depth to protect DigitalOcean’s customers’ workloads
Cultivate and promote a security culture (10%)
Mentor software engineering teams in security best practices
Help oversee our vulnerability management program

Requirements

What you’ll need

Deep familiarity with at least one kernel security feature (ex: AppArmor, SELinux, Landlock, etc.)
Capable of assessing and understanding the performance implications of code changes to virtualization stacks (especially in Qemu and KVM)
A record of partnering with internal engineering teams to tackle security problems across an entire stack with empathy and creativity
Ability to clearly communicate security topics and vulnerability classes (e.g. memory corruption, privilege escalation, TOCTOU, etc) and provide actionable direction to product teams
Working knowledge of modern development concepts (virtualized environments, containerization, continuous integration + delivery)
5+ years of writing systems level code (embedded systems, kernel, assembly or similar)
Experience guiding software teams on secure architecture design
Written code for an embedded system (raspberry pi, arduino, etc)
Experience building or reviewing threat models and ability to craft malicious user, attacker, and abuse/misuse cases
An understanding of patches and mitigations for hardware side-channel attacks
Familiarity with object-oriented and functional programming concepts, particularly with languages such as Go, Rust, or C

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive salary
Flexible work hours
Paid time off
Professional development opportunities
Employee Assistance Program
Local Employee Meetups
Education reimbursement
Access to LinkedIn Learning courses
Equity compensation options

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

kernel security featuresQemuKVMsystems level codeembedded systemsassemblythreat modelingobject-oriented programmingfunctional programmingGo

Soft Skills

collaborationmentoringcommunicationempathycreativity