Senior Security Software Engineer EDR

Summary

The Detection team within Apple Services Engineering (ASE) is responsible for finding any threat actors attacking approximately three quarters of Apple's systems and services. We do this by partnering closely with engineering teams to build a deep technical understanding of how their systems work, and a comprehensive understanding of the threats against them.

A growing part of that mission is the endpoint detection and response (EDR) technology we build ourselves. It is a Swift-based agent that runs on Linux (x86 and ARM64) and on Apple operating systems running on Apple silicon. It collects security telemetry, evaluates detections directly on the host, and takes response action on the host. It also supports Apple's Private Cloud Compute (PCC), the system that extends the privacy and security of Apple devices into the cloud and runs the larger models behind Apple Intelligence. Most of your work will be on Apple's own internal servers, and some of it supports public-facing products used by hundreds of millions of people.

Description

We are looking for an exceptional engineer to help us grow this agent to protect a very large fleet, and to do it without ever taking production down. You will bring two things at once: the engineering depth to ship new capabilities quickly, and a reliability mindset that treats every release as something that runs on production hosts. You will take vague, high-stakes problems and turn them into working software, working with other teams to find out what to build and how. This is not a role where you will be handed pre-defined tickets.

Minimum Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience building, shipping and supporting production software or system software.
• Personal proficiency, in at least one high-level or scripting language (Python or Rust) and at least one low-level systems language (C or C++).
• Solid knowledge of operating system internals (processes, threads, memory, system calls, namespaces). Linux, macOS or both.
• Credible understanding of attacker behavior and security concepts, and of how malicious activity shows up in host telemetry such as process, network and file events.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or operating endpoint, host or agent software deployed at large scale, with performance and availability objectives.
• Experience with eBPF, EndpointSecurity or similar OS-level instrumentation, and an understanding of how those mechanisms can be evaded or disabled.
• Experience with Swift on server, concurrency in Swift, and cross-platform builds.
• Understanding of EDR or host-based detection techniques and the current industry state of the art.
• Experience with policy-driven detection logic (for example OPA/Rego), and with statistical techniques such as probabilistic data structures for bounded-memory anomaly detection.
• Experience with virtualization and hypervisor environments.
• Experience building CI/CD and release tooling for software deployed to hosts, including staged rollout and rollback.