Network Packet Processing Engineer – Security Engine (ot/ics Focus)

HARMAN'S ENGINEERS AND DESIGNERS ARE CREATIVE, PURPOSEFUL AND AGILE

As part of this team, you'll combine your technical expertise with innovative ideas to help drive cutting-edge solutions in the car, enterprise and connected ecosystem. Every day, you will push the boundaries of creative design, and HARMAN is committed to providing you with the opportunities, innovative technologies and resources to build a successful career.

A CAREER AT HARMAN

As a technology leader that is rapidly on the move, HARMAN is filled with people who are focused on making life better. Innovation, inclusivity and teamwork are a part of our DNA. When you add that to the challenges we take on and solve together, you'll discover that at HARMAN you can grow, make a difference and be proud of the work you do everyday.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are developing a high-performance Security Engine that inspects, analyzes, and processes real-time OT/ICS network traffic at scale. You will design and optimize the packet capture, parsing, and traffic distribution pipeline that powers our threat detection and protocol analysis stack (including Zeek and Suricata).

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design and implement high-speed packet capture and processing pipelines.
• Integrate with Zeek/Suricata and develop custom protocol parsers for OT/ICS traffic.
• Optimize for performance (multi-threading, NUMA-aware processing, zero-copy I/O).
• Implement flow distribution strategies to scale traffic across multiple analysis engines.
• Benchmark and profile packet processing performance, identify and resolve bottlenecks.
• Work closely with the Threat Detection and Protocol Engineering teams to extend protocol coverage.
• Ensure lossless packet capture at high bandwidths (10–40Gbps+ environments).

REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

• Strong proficiency in C/C++ (memory management, multi-threading, lock-free data structures).
• Hands-on experience with high-performance packet I/O frameworks, such as:
• DPDK (preferred)
• PF_RING
• AF_XDP
• libpcap (for integration purposes)
• Deep understanding of network protocols (Ethernet, IPv4/IPv6, TCP/UDP) and packet processing concepts.
• Familiarity with OT/ICS protocols (Modbus, DNP3, IEC 104, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, OPC UA) or willingness to learn.
• Experience with Linux kernel networking internals and performance tuning.
• Knowledge of NIC hardware offloading features (RSS, SR-IOV, flow steering).
• Strong profiling and benchmarking skills for network-intensive applications.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience integrating with IDS/IPS platforms (Zeek, Suricata, Snort).
• Exposure to traffic replay tools (tcpreplay, MoonGen).
• Experience with parallel and distributed packet processing architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud-native environments and containerized deployments (Docker/K8s).
• Previous work in OT/ICS network security or industrial networking.

HARMAN is proud to be an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.