Cohesity is the leader in AI-powered data security. Over 13,600 enterprise customers, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 and nearly 70% of the Global 500, rely on Cohesity to strengthen their resilience while providing Gen AI insights into their vast amounts of data. Formed from the combination of Cohesity with Veritas’ enterprise data protection business, the company’s solutions secure and protect data on-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge. Backed by NVIDIA, IBM, HPE, Cisco, AWS, Google Cloud, and others, Cohesity is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with offices around the globe.
We’ve been named a Leader by multiple analyst firms and have been globally recognized for Innovation, Product Strength, and Simplicity in Design , and our culture .
Want to join the leader in AI-powered data security?
About the Role
We are looking for a highly experienced Staff Engineer with deep expertise in Windows internals, Active Directory internals, and AD security . This is a single, combined role: you will build the Windows agent, model Active Directory at the protocol and database level, and reason about how attackers compromise a directory and how a defender recovers from it. The work spans granular change tracking, object recovery, forest-level backup, identity threat detection, and full forest recovery onto clean operating systems.
How You'll Spend Your Time Here
Design and deliver AD protection features: granular change tracking, object- and attribute-level recovery, forest-aware backup, and full forest recovery.
Build and own the Windows agent a signed, serviceable, silently upgradeable component running on domain controllers.
Design identity threat detection : change-delta engines, rules for privileged-object and ACL abuse, and the findings pipeline into audit log and SIEM.
Own the safety of write and restore paths — idempotent steps, USN-rollback safety, pre-flight validation before any destructive action.
Engage across the security lifecycle: threat modeling, architecture review, attack-surface reduction, vulnerability remediation.
Work hands-on in code and test automation, including automated recovery drills and fidelity validation.
Lead projects, mentor engineers, and build Windows and AD depth across the team.
We'd Love to Talk to You If You Have Many of the Following
Education
B.S./M.S./Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
Experience
10+ years in software design and development, with significant time on Windows-platform software.
5+ years with Active Directory internals — building software that reads, writes, replicates, backs up, or recovers directory data, not only administering it.
3+ years security-focused: identity security, detection engineering, security architecture, or product security.
Shipping agent or systems software onto customer-managed production infrastructure.
Windows Platform & Agent Engineering
Windows internals: registry and hive structure, the SYSTEM hive and BootKey material, WMI, services, RPC.
Agent development in C++, C#, or Go; VSS writers and shadow copy APIs — writer sets, freeze/thaw, DiskShadow, orphaned shadows.
Windows security model: SIDs, tokens, privileges, ACLs and SDDL, impersonation, service accounts.
Serviceability and transport: code signing, MSI packaging, silent upgrade, mTLS and certificate handling, gRPC agent-to-cluster channels with resumable operations.
Debugging: WinDbg, ETW, performance counters, dump analysis; PowerShell modules, remoting, and hosting PowerShell from native code.
Active Directory Internals
Schema, object classes, naming contexts, linked-value replication ; safe writes — modify, ModifyDN, object create.
LDAP at depth: filters, server controls, paged and persistent search, change notification; DirSync and USN cookies for incremental capture.
Tombstones , deleted-object lifetime, Recycle Bin; SID, SID history and GUID continuity semantics.
Group Policy internals (GPC/GPT, SYSVOL, DFSR/FRS, authoritative restore);…