Technical Lead (Threat Modeling, PSIRT)

Company Description

Arista Networks is an industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large data center, campus and routing environments. Arista is a well-established and profitable company with over $8 billion in revenue. Arista’s award-winning platforms, ranging in Ethernet speeds up to 800G bits per second, redefine scalability, agility, and resilience.  Arista is a founding member of the Ultra Ethernet consortium. We have shipped over 20 million cloud networking ports worldwide with Cloud Vision and EOS, an advanced network operating system. Arista is committed to open standards, and its products are available worldwide directly and through partners.

At Arista, we value the diversity of thought and perspectives each employee brings. We believe fostering an inclusive environment where individuals from various backgrounds and experiences feel welcome is essential for driving creativity and innovation.

Our commitment to excellence has earned us several prestigious awards, such as the Great Place to Work Survey for Best Engineering Team and Best Company for Diversity, Compensation, and Work-Life Balance. At Arista, we take pride in our track record of success and strive to maintain the highest quality and performance standards in everything we do.

Job Description

Who You'll Work With

Arista Networks is seeking a deeply technical and operationally strategic Technical Lead,
Product Security Program & Operations. In this role, you will serve as a core link between
Arista’s engineering groups, external security researchers, federal stakeholders, and executive
leadership.

This is not a purely administrative role; it requires a strong technical background in network
operating systems, exploit mechanics, and secure software development. You will drive the
product security vulnerability lifecycle, lead threat modeling and penetration testing strategies
for Arista’s switch architecture, integrate security mechanisms into our software development
lifecycle (SDLC), and ensure our federal cloud environments maintain an aggressive security
posture.

Alternate Work Locations: Dallas, TX | Raleigh, NC 

What Will You Do?

Key Responsibilities
1. Technical PSIRT, Vulnerability & Exploit Analysis

• Vulnerability Lifecycle Management: Drive the end-to-end process of turning discovered or reported vulnerabilities within Arista products into verified, highly accurate security advisories.
• Technical Triage & Root Cause Analysis: Triage incoming vulnerability reports from internal testing, automated tools, and external researchers. Evaluate exploitability, proof-of-concepts (PoCs), and determine blast radius/severity using CVSS and CWE frameworks.
• Developer Enablement & Advisory: Partner directly with software engineers to explain root-cause vulnerabilities, provide remediation guidance, and oversee the drafting and structural validation of technical security advisories.
• Coordinated Disclosure: Coordinate with the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), MITRE, and external research teams to ensure professional, precise, and timely disclosure.
• Metrics Strategy: Analyze vulnerability trends to identify systemic security gaps, delivering data-driven architecture recommendations to senior engineering leadership.

2. Advanced Penetration Testing & Switch Architecture Security

• Program Oversight & Scoping: Manage the comprehensive execution of third-party security testing and red-teaming across Arista’s product portfolio.
• Architectural Threat Modeling: Translate Arista’s switch architecture, control/data plane separation, and Sysdb-driven state mechanisms into clear threat vectors to scope high-value targets for penetration testers.
• Remediation & Validation: Critically review penetration testing findings, distinguish theoretical risks from practical exploits, and validate that engineering fixes  comprehensively eliminate the underlying architectural susceptibility to security issues.
• Executive Reporting: Distill complex cryptographic, hardware, or software vulnerabilities into clear risk profiles for executive management and enterprise customers.

3. Secure SDLC & DevSecOps Engineering

• Shifting Left: Architect, implement, and optimize security checkpoints throughout Arista’s development lifecycles to detect flaws before code reaches production.
• Pipeline Integration: Drive the adoption and tuning of automated security tooling (SAST, DAST, SCA, and container scanning) directly into the CI/CD infrastructure.
• Secure Coding Standards: Define and evangelize secure coding practices, threat modeling principles (e.g., STRIDE), and framework-level mitigations to mitigate common software flaws (memory unsafety, injection, privi