What is a Security Engineer at Aircall?

As a Staff Security Engineer, Product Security at Aircall, you are the primary defender and strategic architect of our core communication platforms. Aircall is revolutionizing the cloud telephony space by seamlessly integrating voice communications with the business tools our customers use every day. In this role, you are not just finding vulnerabilities; you are building a resilient, scalable security culture that protects millions of real-time voice interactions, sensitive customer data, and complex API integrations.

Your impact extends across the entire product ecosystem. You will work closely with engineering and product teams to secure our web applications, backend services, and cloud infrastructure. Because Aircall handles highly sensitive VoIP data and integrates with massive platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot, the security challenges you face will be uniquely complex. You will be expected to balance rigorous security standards with the high-performance, low-latency requirements of real-time communication.

This is a senior, highly strategic position. As a Staff Security Engineer, you will operate at a high level of autonomy, influencing the technical roadmap and mentoring other engineers. You will define how we approach threat modeling, shape our DevSecOps pipelines, and ensure that security is built into our products by design, rather than bolted on as an afterthought. Expect a dynamic environment where your technical depth and leadership will directly shape the trust our customers place in Aircall.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for a senior security role at Aircall requires a strategic mindset. We are looking for candidates who can seamlessly blend deep technical expertise with pragmatic, business-enabling problem-solving. You should approach your preparation by mastering the following key evaluation criteria:

Role-Related Knowledge – This evaluates your deep technical expertise in Product Security, application security (AppSec), and cloud infrastructure. Interviewers will look for your mastery of secure coding practices, vulnerability management, and modern authentication protocols. You can demonstrate strength here by fluently discussing how you have secured complex, cloud-native applications and mitigated advanced attack vectors.

Problem-Solving Ability – We want to see how you approach ambiguity and structure complex security challenges. In the context of Aircall, this often means conducting threat models on new features or designing secure architectures for real-time data flows. You will excel by showing a logical, methodical approach to identifying risks and proposing scalable, pragmatic mitigations.

Leadership and Influence – As a Staff Security Engineer, your ability to lead without direct authority is critical. We evaluate how you drive security initiatives, mentor peers, and influence cross-functional teams like engineering and product. Strong candidates will share concrete examples of how they have championed a security-first culture and successfully negotiated security requirements with product managers.

Culture Fit and Values – Aircall thrives on collaboration, transparency, and continuous learning. Interviewers will assess how you navigate conflict, handle mistakes, and collaborate with developers. You can stand out by demonstrating empathy for engineering teams and framing security as an enabler rather than a roadblock.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Staff Security Engineer at Aircall is rigorous, collaborative, and designed to evaluate both your technical depth and your strategic vision. You will begin with an initial recruiter screen to align on your background, expectations, and the core requirements of the role. This is followed by a hiring manager interview, which focuses heavily on your past experiences, your approach to product security, and your alignment with Aircall’s mission.

As you progress to the technical rounds, expect deep dives into architecture, threat modeling, and application security. Unlike processes that rely on obscure trivia, our technical interviews are highly practical. You will be asked to review architectures, identify flaws in system designs, and discuss how you would implement security controls in a modern cloud environment. We prioritize your thought process, your ability to communicate risks clearly, and your pragmatism in finding solutions.

The final stages involve cross-functional and leadership interviews. You will meet with senior engineering leaders and peers to discuss how you influence teams, drive security culture, and handle pushback. Throughout the process, Aircall emphasizes a conversational, two-way dialogue; we want you to interview us just as much as we are interviewing you.

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This visual timeline outlines the typical progression from your initial screening calls through the technical deep-dives and final leadership rounds. Use this to pace your preparation, ensuring you review deep technical concepts early on while reserving time later to refine your behavioral and leadership narratives. Note that the exact sequence of technical rounds may shift slightly depending on interviewer availability.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed in the Aircall interview process, you must demonstrate mastery across several core domains. Below is a breakdown of the primary evaluation areas, what they entail, and how you can prepare.

Threat Modeling and Architecture Review

This area is critical because Aircall continuously ships new features and integrations that must be secure by design. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to look at a complex system, identify potential threat vectors, and propose robust security controls. Strong performance means you can systematically break down an architecture, prioritize risks based on business impact, and design pragmatic defenses.

Be ready to go over:

• Data flow analysis – Mapping how sensitive data (like PII or VoIP streams) moves through a system and identifying trust boundaries.
• Threat frameworks – Utilizing methodologies like STRIDE or PASTA to systematically uncover vulnerabilities in proposed designs.
• Mitigation strategies – Designing scalable security controls such as rate limiting, encryption in transit/at rest, and zero-trust principles.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Securing WebRTC architectures, voice-specific attack vectors (like SIP toll fraud), and complex microservices mesh security.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through how you would threat model a new integration between Aircall and a third-party CRM like Salesforce."
• "If we are designing a new real-time transcription service for voice calls, what are the primary security risks, and how would you mitigate them?"
• "Describe a time you found a fundamental architectural flaw late in the development lifecycle. How did you handle it?"

Application Security and Vulnerability Management

As a Product Security expert, you are the last line of defense against application-layer attacks. This area tests your knowledge of common vulnerabilities, secure coding practices, and how to embed security tooling into the CI/CD pipeline. We look for candidates who can go beyond simply running a scanner to actually understanding the root cause of vulnerabilities and helping developers fix them.

Be ready to go over:

• OWASP Top 10 and beyond – Deep understanding of injection, broken authentication, SSRF, IDOR, and modern API security flaws.
• Security tooling – Practical experience integrating SAST, DAST, and SCA tools into development pipelines without slowing down engineering velocity.
• Authentication and Authorization – Mastery of OAuth 2.0, SAML, OIDC, and role-based access control (RBAC) implementations.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Bypassing modern WAFs, exploiting complex race conditions, and cryptographic implementation flaws.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How would you explain the impact of an Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) vulnerability to a junior developer, and how would you guide them to fix it?"
• "We want to implement a new SAST tool across 50 engineering teams. How do you roll this out to ensure high adoption and low friction?"
• "Walk me through the flow of OAuth 2.0. Where are the most common security pitfalls when developers implement it?"

Cloud Security and DevSecOps

Aircall operates entirely in the cloud, meaning our infrastructure security is deeply intertwined with our product security. You will be evaluated on your ability to secure AWS environments, manage identity and access, and ensure that our infrastructure as code (IaC) is secure by default.

Be ready to go over:

• AWS Security – Deep knowledge of IAM, S3 policies, Security Groups, VPCs, and AWS-native security services.
• Container and Kubernetes Security – Securing Docker images, managing Kubernetes RBAC, and understanding container escape vectors.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Writing secure Terraform configurations and implementing automated checks for misconfigurations.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Cloud-native incident response, advanced AWS IAM privilege escalation paths, and serverless security.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How do you ensure that developers cannot accidentally expose an S3 bucket or an internal API to the public internet?"
• "Describe your approach to managing secrets and credentials in a highly distributed microservices environment."
• "If an alert triggers showing unusual cross-account IAM role assumption in our AWS environment, what are your immediate next steps?"

Leadership and Cross-Functional Influence

As a Staff Security Engineer, your technical skills must be matched by your ability to lead. This area evaluates how you drive consensus, mentor others, and build a security-conscious culture. Strong candidates demonstrate emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, and the ability to align security goals with business objectives.

Be ready to go over:

• Stakeholder management – Balancing product deadlines with essential security requirements.
• Mentorship – Elevating the security knowledge of the broader engineering organization through training or champion programs.
• Strategic planning – Building and executing a multi-quarter product security roadmap.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Leading incident response communications with executive leadership or managing external bug bounty relationships.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to block a major product release due to a critical security issue. How did you manage the relationship with the product manager?"
• "How do you scale security knowledge across an engineering team of 200+ developers when you are the only security engineer?"
• "Describe a major security initiative you proposed, designed, and drove to completion. What was the impact?"

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Key Responsibilities

As a Staff Security Engineer at Aircall, your day-to-day work will be highly dynamic, bridging the gap between high-level strategy and deep technical execution. You will be the primary point of contact for product security, working hand-in-hand with engineering pods to ensure that new features are architected securely from day one. This involves leading formal threat modeling sessions, conducting rigorous architecture reviews, and providing actionable security guidance early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

You will also be responsible for driving the evolution of our DevSecOps practices. This means evaluating, implementing, and tuning security tooling—such as SAST, DAST, and dependency scanners—to provide high-signal, low-noise alerts to developers. You will actively review code for complex security vulnerabilities, particularly in critical areas like authentication, authorization, and data processing. Furthermore, you will manage our vulnerability disclosure and bug bounty programs, triaging incoming reports and coordinating remediations.

Beyond the technical deliverables, a significant portion of your role involves leadership and culture building. You will mentor junior and mid-level security engineers, as well as act as a security champion for the broader engineering organization. You will collaborate closely with Product Managers, Legal, and Compliance teams to ensure that Aircall meets global regulatory standards (like GDPR and CCPA) while continuing to deliver innovative, high-quality features to our users.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be highly competitive for the Staff Security Engineer role at Aircall, you need a robust blend of deep technical expertise, extensive industry experience, and proven leadership capabilities. We are looking for candidates who have a track record of securing complex, high-scale cloud environments.

• Must-have technical skills – Deep expertise in Application Security (OWASP, secure coding, API security), strong proficiency in Cloud Security (specifically AWS, IAM, and VPC design), and practical experience with DevSecOps tooling in CI/CD pipelines.
• Must-have experience level – Typically 8+ years of experience in cybersecurity, with a significant portion dedicated to Product Security or Application Security in a SaaS or cloud-native environment. Experience operating at a Senior or Staff level is essential.
• Must-have soft skills – Exceptional communication skills, the ability to translate complex security risks into business impact, and a proven track record of influencing cross-functional teams without direct authority.
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience with real-time communications protocols (WebRTC, SIP), knowledge of voice/telephony security, hands-on coding ability in languages like Node.js, Python, or Go, and experience managing bug bounty programs.

Common Interview Questions

The questions below are representative of what candidates face during the Aircall interview process. While you should not memorize answers, use these to understand the patterns of inquiry and the depth of knowledge expected. Our interviewers use these as starting points to dig deeper into your thought process.

Threat Modeling & Architecture Design

This category tests your ability to proactively identify and mitigate risks in complex system designs.

• How would you design a secure authentication and authorization flow for a mobile app consuming a public API?
• Walk me through a threat model for a cloud-based voice recording feature. What are the key trust boundaries?
• How do you secure microservices communicating with each other within an AWS environment?
• If we are building a new integration with a third-party service, what security controls must be in place before we launch?
• Describe the differences between OAuth 2.0 and SAML, and explain when you would use each.

Application & Product Security

These questions evaluate your hands-on knowledge of vulnerabilities and secure development practices.

• Explain how a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attack works and how you would prevent it in a Node.js application.
• How do you approach securing GraphQL APIs compared to traditional REST APIs?
• Walk me through how you would triage and remediate a high-severity bug bounty report for an IDOR vulnerability.
• What is your strategy for managing vulnerable third-party open-source dependencies at scale?
• How do you implement secure session management for a highly sensitive web application?

Cloud Infrastructure & DevSecOps

This focuses on your ability to secure the underlying environments where our products live.

• How do you design an AWS IAM architecture that adheres to the principle of least privilege?
• What security checks would you embed into a GitLab or GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline, and in what order?
• Explain how you would secure a Kubernetes cluster running multi-tenant workloads.
• Describe how you handle secret management (e.g., API keys, database credentials) in a cloud-native architecture.
• If an AWS access key is accidentally committed to a public GitHub repository, what is your automated and manual response?

Behavioral & Leadership

These questions assess your influence, culture fit, and ability to operate at a Staff level.

• Tell me about a time you had to convince a reluctant engineering team to prioritize a major security refactor.
• Describe a situation where you made a mistake that led to a security incident. What did you learn?
• How do you balance the need for rigorous security with a company's need to ship features quickly?
• Walk me through how you have historically mentored developers to become more security-conscious.
• Describe a time you disagreed with a Product Manager about a security requirement. How did you resolve it?

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Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How technical are the interviews for the Staff Security Engineer role? The interviews are highly technical but focused on practical application rather than trivia. You will be expected to read code, design architectures, and discuss cloud configurations in depth. However, because this is a Staff-level role, your ability to explain the "why" behind a technical decision is just as important as the "how."

Q: What is the typical timeline for the interview process at Aircall? The process typically takes 3 to 5 weeks from the initial recruiter screen to a final offer. Aircall moves efficiently, but scheduling the final leadership rounds can sometimes require flexibility. Your recruiter will keep you closely informed at every stage.

Q: What makes a candidate stand out for a Product Security role at Aircall? Standout candidates demonstrate a "paved road" mentality. Rather than just acting as a gatekeeper who points out flaws, the best candidates show how they build tools, libraries, and processes that make the secure way the easiest way for developers to work.

Q: Is this role fully remote, or is there an office expectation? This specific Staff Security Engineer position is based in Seattle, WA. Aircall typically operates on a hybrid model for hub locations, meaning you should expect to be in the office a few days a week to foster collaboration, though specific arrangements can be discussed with your hiring manager.

Other General Tips

• Structure your behavioral answers with STAR: When asked about past experiences, always use the Situation, Task, Action, Result framework. At the Staff level, ensure you heavily emphasize the Result and the broader business impact of your actions.
• Think out loud during technical rounds: Interviewers at Aircall care deeply about your diagnostic process. If you are reviewing an architecture, narrate your thoughts. Explain what you are looking for, what concerns you, and what additional context you would ask for in a real-world scenario.

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• Understand the domain: Take time to research the specific security challenges of cloud telephony, VoIP, and real-time communications. Familiarity with WebRTC, SIP, and the regulatory landscape of voice data will give you a significant advantage.
• Ask strategic questions: Use the time at the end of your interviews to ask insightful questions about Aircall’s security maturity, engineering culture, and strategic roadmap. This demonstrates your seniority and genuine interest in the business.

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Summary & Next Steps

Joining Aircall as a Staff Security Engineer is an incredible opportunity to shape the security posture of a rapidly growing, globally impactful communications platform. You will be tackling unique challenges at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, complex API integrations, and real-time voice technology. This role empowers you to act as a strategic leader, driving a culture where security is seamlessly woven into the fabric of our engineering processes.

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This salary module reflects the compensation range for the Staff Security Engineer position based in Seattle, WA. The range of $215,000 to$265,000 USD represents the base salary, and your specific offer will be determined by your experience level, technical performance during the interviews, and overall alignment with the role's expectations. Keep in mind that total compensation may also include equity and comprehensive benefits.

As you prepare, focus heavily on refining your ability to communicate complex security concepts clearly and pragmatically. Review your past projects, practice threat modeling aloud, and ensure you can articulate how you balance rigorous security with engineering velocity. Remember that Aircall is looking for a partner—someone who can secure our products while enabling the business to scale.

You have the experience and the technical depth to excel in this process. For more insights, deep dives into specific technical questions, and community discussions, be sure to explore additional resources on Dataford. Trust in your preparation, bring your authentic self to the conversations, and show us how you can elevate the security culture at Aircall. Good luck!