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Salary: USD 152,300 - 165,000 / annual
Rocket Lab is seeking a Principal Cloud Security Engineer to secure all facets of the company's cloud presence, including vendor services, code pipelines, and automation performing business-critical operations. Based onsite in Long Beach, CA, this role reports to the IT organization and requires deep expertise in cloud-first, automated, API-driven security architecture.
You will design, implement, and maintain security controls for hybrid cloud-based environments (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS). Key responsibilities include:
- Design and develop custom automation to support cyber team objectives
- Conduct security assessments and risk analyses for public cloud, CI/CD pipelines, and agentic systems
- Implement and manage identity and access management (IAM) solutions
- Develop documentation, plans, and proofs of concept for cybersecurity platform improvements
- Configure and monitor cloud security tools and services
- Collaborate with development teams to integrate security into SDLC, DevOps, and MLOps
- Maintain systems to track emerging threats and vulnerabilities; recommend proactive security enhancements
- Provide guidance on incident response, compliance, and security awareness
- Participate in security audits, assessments, and compliance reviews
- Provide analyses with quantifiable statistical information regarding IT and cybersecurity risk to business partners
Rocket Lab is the end-to-end space company building rockets, spacecraft, and critical subsystems. The IT team supports global operations across computer systems, networks, and devices in a fast-paced, mission-critical environment.
**REQUIREMENTS:**
- 12+ years of experience in scripting languages (Bash, PowerShell, Python) and configuration management/infrastructure as code tools (Puppet, Ansible, Terraform)
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent (16+ years of total work experience)
- Proven experience in cloud security architecture, design, and implementation across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
- Hands-on experience with cloud security tools (AWS Security Hub, Azure Security Center, Google Cloud Security Command Center)
- Experience working under US Government compliance regimes (CMMC, NIST, DISA STIG) and ITIL/Change Review systems
- Proficiency in vulnerability management systems (Tenable, Bringa) and CLI scanning tools (Trivy, OpenSCAP)
- Extensive experience with git-driven version control systems (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket)
- Strong understanding of networking concepts, encryption techniques, and secure communication protocols
- Experience with databases (PostgreSQL, SQLite) and data formats (Parquet, Arrow)
- Proficiency in analytics systems (PowerBI, Jupyter) and vendor-agnostic assessment engines (Cloud Custodian, Panther)
- U.S. citizenship required due to program requirements and ITAR regulations
**NICE-TO-HAVE:**
- Advanced degree in computer science, information technology, cybersecurity, or equivalent
- Involvement with community cybersecurity organizations
- AWS GovCloud / Azure GCC High experience
- CI/CD pipeline security
- Tier 2 cloud vendors
- Hybrid cloud engineering
- SAST and DAST testing
- Secrets management / vaults / HSMs
- Cloud incident response / forensics
- Log aggregators (Graylog, ELK, Splunk)
