Principal Penetration Tester

Title: Principal Penetration Tester Location: United Kingdom

About the Role:

Our Professional Services Team is seeking Associate Principal OT Penetration Tester who will provide technical leadership across vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and adversary emulation activities supporting customer services engagements. You will shape engagement strategy and uncover real‑world attack paths across ICS/OT networks through hands‑on exploitation and deep technical analysis, working closely with customers across critical infrastructure sectors such as oil and gas, electric, water treatment, and manufacturing. You will also translate findings into clear, actionable remediation guidance, influencing detection and platform development. You will mentor team members and be an advisor and representative of Dragos within the broader OT security community.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as primary technical lead and trusted advisor for Dragos’s most complex, high-impact industrial penetration testing, purple teaming, and vulnerability assessment engagements, shaping engagement direction and aligning deep technical execution with client business goals.
• Set the technical bar for OT penetration testing excellence by defining methodologies, assessment frameworks, and red team tactics informed by threat intelligence and adversary emulation. Design and lead offensive campaigns modeled on known and unknown TTPs to uncover complex attack paths across IT/OT boundaries and within industrial environments.
• Translate hands-on findings into strategic R&D priorities, guiding the development of proprietary tools, behavioral analytics, and detection content by identifying gaps in visibility, response, and prevention in customer environments.
• Evolve internal playbooks, runbooks, and operating procedures, applying field lessons, threat intelligence, and emerging adversary behaviors to improve the efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness of the penetration testing practice.
• Engage executive stakeholders, internally and externally, with strategic cybersecurity guidance, risk prioritization, and remediation recommendations tied to business objectives, delivering clear, authoritative presentations to C-suites, boards, and technical leadership.
• Represent Dragos as an industry thought leader through original research, top-tier conference presentations, whitepapers, and public engagements that advance OT security with unique insights and innovation.
• Mentor engineering, threat intelligence, and consulting teams across functions, cultivating future leaders and a culture of continuous learning, technical curiosity, and mission-driven execution.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of hands-on cybersecurity experience in vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, or red teaming within the OT space, with in-depth knowledge of OT penetration testing methodologies in white, gray, and black-box contexts.
• Deep understanding of OT-specific architectures and services, including DCS, historians, SCADA networks, transmission/distribution management, AMI, related communication protocols, and other control systems.
• Extensive knowledge of OT cyber threats, attack paths, exploits, and adversary TTPs.
• Hands-on experience with offensive security tooling such as Metasploit, Nmap, Kali Linux, Cobalt Strike, Burp Suite, common LOTL toolsets, and C2 frameworks.
• Advanced experience with networking components (routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls), plus the ability to analyze network traffic and host data in a cybersecurity context.
• Proven experience using large language models (e.g., Claude) to support penetration testing execution and reporting, including reconnaissance, exploit development, and drafting findings, with sound judgment in validating AI-generated output and securely handling client data.
• Strong report-writing and presentation skills, with the ability to communicate findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work independently in a remote environment and coordinate across distributed teams, with willingness to travel up to 30-40% (domestic and international) to support customer engagements.

Compensation:

• Salary: £105,000
• Competitive Equity Package
• Comprehensive Benefits Plan

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