Security Engineer

Wilson Sonsini is the premier legal advisor to technology, life sciences, and other growth enterprises worldwide. We represent companies at every stage of development, from entrepreneurial start-ups to multibillion-dollar global corporations, as well as the venture firms, private equity firms, and investment banks that finance and advise them. The firm has approximately 1,100 attorneys in 17 offices: 13 in the U.S., two in China, and two in Europe. Our broad spectrum of practices and entrepreneurial spirit allow exceptional opportunities for professional achievement and career growth.

The Security Engineer, under the direction of the Director, Security Engineering and Operations, owns the day-to-day execution of the firm’s vulnerability management program and administers its privileged access management (PAM) platform. This is a hands-on role centered on finding, prioritizing, reporting on, and driving the remediation of vulnerabilities across the firm’s endpoints, servers, network, cloud, and SaaS environments — and on ensuring that administrative and privileged credentials are vaulted, rotated, monitored, and granted on a least-privilege, just-in-time basis.

The right candidate is as comfortable with technical vulnerability details as they are translating findings into clear priorities for system owners, holding remediation to defined SLAs, and producing reporting that IT leadership and clients can act on.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Administer and tune the firm’s vulnerability scanning platform — maintaining asset coverage, authenticated scan credentials, scan schedules, and agent health across workstations, servers, network devices, and cloud workloads
• Triage and prioritize findings using risk-based criteria — CVSS, exploit availability, asset criticality, and internet exposure — rather than raw severity counts, and communicate what actually needs to be fixed first
• Own vulnerability reporting — produce recurring dashboards and metrics (open findings by severity and age, SLA compliance, mean time to remediate, repeat and overdue findings) for IT and security leadership, and supply evidence for client security questionnaires, audits, and assessments
• Drive remediation end to end — assign findings to system owners, track them to closure against defined SLAs, validate fixes through rescans, and escalate stalled items; coordinate with infrastructure, desktop, and application teams on routine patch cycles and emergency patching for actively exploited vulnerabilities
• Coordinate with the GRC team on the risk acceptance and exception process for findings that cannot be remediated on schedule to documenting business justification, compensating controls, and expiration dates, and re-reviewing exceptions before they lapse
• Administer the firm’s privileged access management (PAM) platform — onboarding accounts and systems to the vault, configuring credential rotation, session recording, and approval workflows, and maintaining platform health and integrations
• Enforce least-privilege and just-in-time access for administrative accounts — eliminating standing privileged access and shared credentials wherever possible
• Conduct periodic privileged account discovery and access reviews — identifying orphaned, dormant, over-privileged, and unmanaged service accounts and working with owners to remediate them
• Monitor privileged session activity and PAM alerts and investigate anomalies
• With the GRC team, maintain documentation including standards, SLAs, onboarding procedures, and reporting definitions
• Perform related duties as assigned by supervisor
• Maintain compliance with all company policies and procedures

Education and/or Work Experience Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years of hands-on information security or systems administration experience in an enterprise environment
• Working knowledge of an enterprise vulnerability scanning platform — including agent deployment, asset tagging, and report and dashboard building
• Ability to read CVE and vendor advisory details, assess real-world exploitability, and explain risk clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Familiarity with frameworks and standards commonly referenced by clients and auditors — NIST CSF, CIS Controls, ISO 27001 — and with the patch and remediation SLA expectations typical of regulated or client-driven environments
• Strong organizational skills and follow-through — this role depends on tracking hundreds of open items to closure and holding others accountable, diplomatically and persistently
• Relevant security or vendor platform certifications are valued; demonstrated hands-on results matter more
• Experience in a law firm or other professional services environment is a plus — as is comfort responding to client security requirements, audits, and outside counsel guidelines
• Clear written and verbal communication — able to produce concise reports and status updates that leadership can act on without a security background

 

The primary location for this job posting is in Palo Alto, but other locations may be listed. The actual base pay offered will depend upon a variety of factors, including but not limited to the selected candidate’s qualifications, years of relevant experience, level of education, professional certifications and licenses, and work location. The anticipated pay range for this position is as follows:

Palo Alto, New York, San Francisco: $116,875 - $158,125 per year. Austin, Boston, Boulder, Century City, Delaware, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and all other locations: $105,400 - $142,600 per year.

The compensation for this position may include a discretionary year-end merit bonus based on performance. We offer a highly competitive salary and benefits package.

Benefits information can be found here. Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE).