Sr. CyberSecurity Researcher

Join Aptiv and help lead the automotive industry into a more resilient and assured cybersecurity future. Our team protects our customers from the most advanced threats affecting the automotive industry. Aptiv’s Automotive Red Team is working to protect Aptiv products by executing offensive cybersecurity research and development activities.

Your Role

As our Cyber Research Engineer, you will focus primarily on proposing and executing novel cyber research into areas such as reverse engineering, hardware and software exploitation, and offensive cyber analysis. Additionally, you will work to validate vulnerability reports and mitigations impacting embedded systems. You will be interfacing with product security operations center, production engineering teams, experimenting with state-of-the-art technologies, and much more. Your contributions will ensure vehicles on the streets are protected from grave threats posed by criminals and terrorists. Your day to day will consist of the following:

• Validate vulnerability reports & mitigations impacting embedded system hardware and software.
• Assist product engineers in understanding impact of vulnerability on component and system level, providing guidance on risk analysis and mitigation strategy.
• Provide technical cyber support to vulnerability management, incident response activities.
• Perform research into discovering 0-days, developing reverse engineering and assessment tools, and conducting assessments and offensive cyber analysis against automotive products in order to outsmart the adversary.
• Create implementation strategies for development of assessment technologies.
• Work with other team members to responsibly transition research findings to production engineering teams around the world.
• Conduct experiments testing the limits of state-of-the-art software and embedded systems technologies to uncover weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
• Generate intellectual property to secure cybersecurity dominance in the automotive space.
• Maintain an up-to-date awareness of offensive/defensive cybersecurity activities in the public/commercial domain and working with the team to accelerate cyber operations
• Dissect longer projects and efforts into sub-tasks that can demonstrate incremental progress on a bi-monthly to monthly basis.
• Guide product teams through integration of new cybersecurity system designs and validation methodologies.

• Defend research viewpoints to senior and executive leadership by providing compelling information and evidence.

Your Background

Key ingredients for succeeding in this role are your:

• 5+ years of experience in vulnerability research, reverse engineering, or exploit development.
• 5+ years of experience with C, assembly (MIPS, RISC-V, Intel x86_64, proprietary architectures, etc.), or similar low-level development.
• Experience with: 1) host-based virtualization (VMware workstation, QEMU-KVM, Xen, etc.) and emulation technologies (QEMU, Simics, etc.); 2) conducting offensive cyber research such as vulnerability research & exploit development against embedded systems.
• Experience working with disassemblers such as IDA Pro, Ghidra, or radare2.
• scripting languages like Python in a Linux-like environment.
• Familiarity with embedded systems development and use of cryptography and/or communications implementations.
• Good organization, communication, collaboration and interpersonal skills.
• A go-getter that is passionate to learn about new security vulnerabilities and develop assessment automation solutions.
• Interest and/or experience with bug bounties, capture-the-flag competitions, etc.
• Experience proposing and executing independent research and development tasks and writing conference-level technical reports.
• High level of interpersonal skills to work independently and effectively with others.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree or Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering or similar discipline.
• Familiarity with automotive communication systems (CAN, CAN-FD, automotive Ethernet, etc.).
• Familiarity with automotive operating systems such as SROS2 and software communications middleware DDS.
• Familiarity with Bluetooth, NFC, and/or Wi-Fi implementations and communications.
• Familiarity with version control systems and code review processes.
• General understanding of circuit schematics, hardware data sheets, and/or logic design.
• Experience working as part of a cross-functional team to implement diverse solutions.
• Experience representing technical viewpoints to diverse audiences and in m