Rapid7 - Senior Software Engineer - Security Protocols

Description :

Senior Software Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the VM Policy Content team, responsible for building and maintaining security configuration compliance content across operating systems and applications. This role focuses on developing high-fidelity policy checks aligned to industry benchmarks such as CIS, ensuring accuracy, scalability, and low false-positive rates across customer environments.

About the Team :

The VM Policy Content team develops and maintains security configuration compliance content used by customers to assess operating systems and enterprise applications against industry benchmarks such as CIS and DISA STIG. Our work directly impacts customer trust by ensuring accurate, reliable, and scalable compliance assessments within the vulnerability management platform.

About the Role :

As a Senior Software Engineer, your primary responsibility will be to design, develop, and maintain security policy content that powers automated compliance assessments for operating systems and enterprise applications. Specifically, your focus will be to:

- Design, build, maintain, and release well-architected services, writing clean, correct, and maintainable code while making sound design decisions and tradeoffs

- Develop and maintain benchmark-aligned policy checks using Python and XML-based standards

- Translate CIS benchmark guidance into accurate, testable, and scalable detection logic

- Improve policy reliability by reducing false positives, identifying defect patterns, and strengthening deterministic evaluation logic

- Take an active role in feature design and planning, contributing as a key stakeholder throughout the development lifecycle

- Partner with Product Management, UX, QA, and Support to ensure customer requirements are well understood and effectively implemented

- Mentor and coach junior engineers by providing technical guidance, conducting code reviews, and promoting engineering best practices

- Develop deep product knowledge to support complex customer scenarios and troubleshooting needs

The skills and qualities youll bring include :

- 5+ years of experience in software development with strong hands-on expertise in Python, and working knowledge of Java in enterprise environments.

- Strong problem-solving ability with experience debugging complex logic and edge cases

- Clear and effective technical communication across engineering and non-engineering stakeholders

- Demonstrated ownership mindset with the ability to drive work independently in ambiguous environments

- Experience mentoring or coaching junior engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing

- Core Value Embodiment: Embody our core values to foster a culture of excellence that drives meaningful impact and collective success.

- Developing automation, transformation, and parsing logic using Python

- Working with structured data formats such as XML (e.g., XCCDF, OVAL, SCAP or similar schemas)

- Interpreting and implementing security configuration benchmarks (CIS & DISA STIG)

- Designing deterministic logic to evaluate operating system and application configurations

- Testing frameworks such as PyTest (Python) or JUnit (Java)

- CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins

- Debugging and resolving complex defects in production systems

- Working knowledge of Linux, Mac and/or Windows operating systems

- Experience developing and testing against virtual machine environments

- Familiarity with security, compliance, or vulnerability management tooling