Senior Space Red Team Operator

Senior Space Red Team Operator

SIXGEN's mission is to deliver agile, mission-ready cybersecurity solutions that empower government and critical infrastructure organizations to stay ahead of advanced cyber threats. We combine innovation, deep expertise, and leading technical capabilities to uncover vulnerabilities, protect vital systems, and strengthen operational resilience.

POSITION OVERVIEW

Position:

Senior Space Red Team Operator

Job Type:

Full Time

Location:

Remote or Hybrid with travel to customer and test locations as required

Clearance Requirement:

Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance; active Secret or higher preferred

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• SIXGEN is seeking a hands-on Senior Space Red Team Operator to lead authorized adversarial assessments of space systems and the infrastructure that supports them. You will evaluate attack paths across spacecraft, payload, ground, cloud, mission-network, and operator environments; develop safe and repeatable test methods; and translate technical findings into clear mission risk and practical engineering improvements. This role is suited to an operator who can move comfortably between Linux hosts, cloud services, embedded targets, and customer briefings while maintaining disciplined authorization and mission-safety boundaries.

Responsibilities include:

• Lead end-to-end red team assessments, penetration tests, and threat-informed adversary emulation against authorized space and mission systems.
• Develop assessment plans, attack paths, test cases, and Rules of Engagement that define objectives, authorization boundaries, safety controls, prohibited actions, and stop-work criteria.
• Assess Linux-based systems, embedded devices, flight and payload software, ground-station services, mission networks, cloud environments, and supporting applications for exploitable weaknesses.
• Research and validate vulnerabilities in firmware, operating systems, communications interfaces, authentication flows, APIs, containers, identity services, and other mission-relevant components.
• Create or adapt operator tooling, exploits, proof-of-concept code, automation, and test harnesses to support repeatable assessment objectives.
• Coordinate closely with system owners, engineers, operators, range personnel, and defensive teams to execute testing without unacceptable impact to safety, availability, or mission operations.
• Correlate technical access with realistic mission effects and help customers understand how weaknesses could affect command, telemetry, payload data, availability, or operational trust.
• Document evidence, reproduction steps, attack chains, severity, and prioritized remediation recommendations in clear technical reports and executive briefings.
• Support purple-team validation, detection engineering, remediation retesting, and after-action activities to confirm that identified attack paths have been reduced or closed.
• Mentor operators, contribute to internal tradecraft and lab development, and support technical scoping, customer discussions, and proposal efforts when needed.

WHAT YOU BRING

• Required qualifications: Seven or more years of hands-on experience in red teaming, penetration testing, vulnerability research, exploit development, or closely related offensive security work; equivalent military, government, or industry experience will be considered.
• Advanced Linux knowledge, including networking, permissions, services, process behavior, logging, troubleshooting, and security controls.
• Hands-on embedded-systems knowledge, including firmware analysis, boot processes, hardware-software interfaces, common processor architectures, debugging, and at least some exposure to RTOS or embedded Linux environments.
• Practical cloud-security knowledge in at least one major platform such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, including identity and access management, networking, logging, storage, compute, and common misconfiguration paths.
• Experience assessing enterprise networks and applications, including TCP/IP, routing, VPNs, DNS, authentication protocols, web services, APIs, and segmented or hybrid environments.
• Ability to write and review code or automation in Python and shell scripting; working knowledge of C, C++, Go, or similar systems-oriented language is strongly valued.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently, manage technical ambiguity, preserve evidence, and communicate risk to both deeply technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Commitment to authorized testing, operational safety, professional ethics, and careful handling of sensitive customer information.
• Ability to travel periodically and support testing windows that may occur outside normal business hours.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience assessing satellites, spacecraft buses, payloads, ground stations, mission-control systems, or other aerospace and operational-technology environments.
• Familiarity with spacecraft flight software, command and telemetry workflows, common space-data protocols, or platforms such as NASA core Flight System.
• Experience with firmware extraction and reverse engineering, JTAG or SWD, UART, SPI, I2C, CAN, bootloaders, device drivers, or hardware debugging tools.
• Experience with containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, cloud-native services, and identity attack paths across hybrid environments.
• Familiarity with radio-frequency systems, software-defined radio, satellite communications, or testing within hardware-in-the-loop and cyber-range environments.
• Active U.S. Government security clearance and prior work supporting Department of War, Intelligence Community, civil-space, or commercial-space missions.
• Relevant certifications such as OSCP, OSEP, OSED, GXPN, GPEN, GREM, or comparable demonstrated technical expertise.

OUR COMMITMENT

We are committed to fostering an inclusive culture that values diversity in our people and reflects the communities and customers we serve. We strive to attract and retain a diverse talent pool and to create an environment where everyone is empowered to do their best work.