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Seattle. San Francisco. Mountain View. New York. Chicago.

Full-time. careers at matasano.com.

Matasano. iSEC Partners. Matasisec Partners?

Job title: Bearer of Bad Tidings.

Downside first: not getting to build something that people want. In fact, having to build things that people explicitly don't want.

Now the upside: Runtimes. Linkers. Crypto. Kernel code. Whole operating systems. WinAPI, POSIX, Mach. Bluetooth. Messaging systems. Payments. iPhone apps. Android apps. Chipsets. Ajax. Javascript parsers. C. FFIs to C in your favorite language. Ruby. Scala. Lisp. Electronic trading markets. Firmware. Reverse engineering. Lattice basis reduction and Fourier-transform search algorithms. Middleware. Crawling around in the ventilation ducts of the world's most popular and important applications.

We have strong teams (larger than most YC companies) at each of our offices. They're some of the smartest, funnest people you could ever want to work with, and you'll get to work with all of them; we mix and match teams from across the country. Interested in hardware? In cryptography? In exploit development? In large-scale web crawling? We offer opportunities to work with some of the best in the industry.

We have the best clients; our client base is a pretty good cross section of this whole hiring thread.

Are you an HN regular? You can't possibly waste my time with questions. We love smart people who can code who want to learn software security.

Everything you could want to know about our hiring process: http://www.matasano.com/careers.

Want a taste of our work? http://microcorruption.com.




matasano - always hiring, never replying to emails. I passed the crypto challenge and took the suggestion to apply - no answer. So I asked tptacek why they didn't reply - he said that was definitely a mistake, and I should send my application again. Of course again I got no answer. The crypto challenge was enjoyable though, so thanks for that I suppose.


Are you hitting my spam filter or something? We have a group of 4 people that work together to handle the mail we get at careers@. If you send something and get no response, you can escalate, like you're doing here.

(I can't answer the question I just asked myself, because I have no idea who you are. Sorry!)

I don't know what else to tell you. We don't ignore mail to careers@. For instance: the H1B cap is now closed for the year, but we're still replying to people who would need a visa to work in the US.


It occurred to me a minute ago to tell someone else to mail me at my personal address; you can do that too if you like. I'm thomas at sockpuppet.org. Pretty sure that won't get spam filtered.


I'm curious as to whether you have some further complication than spam filters here. I got as far in your pipeline as answering one email about what location I'm interested in, and then heard nothing more. This might not be news, but if you're having trouble getting other messages it also might be worth knowing.


Why don't you consider some alternative work-around visas? Like L-1. And you can fallback to H1B when those become available again.


We do; we have on-staff immigration people. It's not always possible.


"always hiring, never replying to emails". I applied for a position in NYC last year and I never heard back from them.


I've emailed/tweeted at you a few times and got no responses. I really wanted a job/internship at Matasano Chicago. Eventually I got through to somebody to schedule a call with me only to have the call canceled and was told I wasn't a good fit before even saying anything to anybody.

Even with that experience... I still would like an opportunity.


Can you email me directly at thomas at sockpuppet.org? That's my personal mail account --- in case people are getting spam filtered. I want to find out what happened there.

We did get a bajillion internship applications this year, and I believe we may have capped out on them, but we should have handled that gracefully regardless. If we scheduled a call, we owed it to you to actually get on the phone. I apologize.


Email sent. Thanks.


I sent an email asking about the crypto challenge but didn't get a reply :( My email is my username @ gmail.


A few months ago I asked you why you don't do remote work. I followed up with an email. I realize you're busy, but still I would have appreciated an answer, since you asked me to send you an email anyway.


We're an office culture. We're constantly getting into situations where we hit technical challenges we haven't solved before, but someone else in the office has. Several times a day you'll see people crowd around someone's computer trying to work through some bug or misbehavior to see if we can, as a group, turn it into something exploitable. That's reason #1.

Reason #2 is fairness. Some of our work is on-site. We arrange our offices so that we have "house accounts" in Chicago, NYC, and SFBA, and on any given day some fraction of the office is likely to be at one of those places. All things being equal, people would like to work from their own office instead of someone else's. If we pick up remote people, those people will by definition not be able to staff on-site projects, which mean that the people who actually come to the office will get stuck with that work.

Reason #3 is that reasons #1 and #2 have been dispositive for us since 2005, and so we have a management structure tuned to that office culture. We're not set up to manage remote team members. We're especially concerned about this because some of us have experience working on assessment teams at "work from home" firms, and have seen wildly uneven results from projects managed like that. We're paranoid about quality and consistency the way a fine dining restaurant is paranoid about the consistency of dishes coming out of the kitchen.

I'm not saying that there's necessarily anything bad about remote/WFH cultures, or that you couldn't build a good assessment firm doing remote/WFH. I'm just saying we haven't done it. :)


Ok, thank you for answering.


I am an early middle-aged "obsolete", "unemployable" American programmer who only has paid experience in pre .NET Visual C++. Should I bother applying?


I'd like to join the crypto challenge to see if I enjoy such work. Unfortunately, my email never got replied.


Are you still doing the crypto challenge? I send you an email saying I want in but never got any reply.




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