Electronic Arts

Senior Security Engineer - Apex Legends

Respawn Entertainment

About the Role

Respawn Entertainment is looking for a Senior Security Engineer (Anti-Cheat) to join the Apex Legends game team. This is a hands-on role working directly alongside engineers and analysts across the team to protect competitive integrity for millions of players across PC and console. Day to day, you reverse engineer exploits, develop mitigations, and harden game systems against novel attack vectors. You also drive the security strategy for game systems, identify emerging threats, and help shape how the team prioritizes anti-cheat work.

People who thrive in this role have a passion for breaking (and then fixing) things. Whether your background is software security, reverse engineering, or researching game exploits, what matters is that you understand how attackers think and can translate that into robust solutions shipping in a live game.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement anti-tamper, detection, and prevention systems within the game codebase.

• Harden client/server communication against injection, replay, timing, and memory-disclosure attacks.

• Identify and close attack surfaces across the full stack - game client, dedicated servers, scripting layer, remote functions, and web services.

• Drive security architecture decisions - both reviewing existing systems for weaknesses and securing new features early in development.

• Assess the threat landscape and prioritize engineering effort against the highest-impact exploits.

• Integrate and support third-party anti-cheat solutions.

• Mentor other engineers on secure coding practices and anti-cheat awareness.
  
  

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in C++ or other low-level languages.

• 3+ years of experience in software security, anti-cheat development, reverse engineering, or exploit research.

• Strong understanding of x86-64 disassembly and debugging tools (e.g. IDA Pro, x64dbg, Ghidra).

• Experience identifying and mitigating vulnerability classes such as buffer overflows, injection attacks, timing attacks, and memory disclosure.

• Deep familiarity with Windows internals (process memory, DLL injection, hooking techniques, driver interaction).

• Understanding of client/server networking architectures and how they are exploited.

• Track record of independently driving security initiatives from investigation through shipped mitigation.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in game development or game security specifically.

• Background in offensive security, penetration testing, or vulnerability research.

• Understanding of attack vectors in game scripting languages, remote function calls, and game web services.

• Knowledge of cryptographic primitives and their application to authentication or tamper detection.

• Experience with memory obfuscation, virtualization, or code protection techniques.

• Experience with compiler internals, LLVM, or custom build tooling for security purposes.

• Understanding of input detection and how hardware-level cheats (macro controllers, input spoofing) operate.

• Experience with machine learning approaches to cheat detection or anomaly detection in player behavior.

• Shipped a multiplayer title or contributed to a live-service game.

• Reverse engineer cheats and exploits to understand attack vectors and develop mitigations.
  
  

What Makes You Stand Out

• You've reversed real game cheats or written proof-of-concept exploits to demonstrate vulnerabilities.

• You can explain how a cheat works at the assembly level and propose multiple mitigation strategies.

• You stay current with the cheating ecosystem and know where the arms race is headed.

• You've shaped anti-cheat strategy for a live product, balancing long-term architecture against urgent live threats.

• British Columbia (depending on location e.g. Vancouver vs. Victoria)
  • $122,300 - $170,700 CAD

• California (depending on location e.g. Los Angeles vs. San Francisco)
  • $143,800 - $217,200 USD

In the US, we offer a package of benefits including paid time off (3 weeks per year to start), 80 hours per year of sick time, 16 paid company holidays per year, 10 weeks paid time off to bond with baby, medical/dental/vision insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, and 401(k) to regular full-time employees. Certain roles may also be eligible for bonus and equity.  

For Canada, we offer a package of benefits including vacation (3 weeks per year to start), 10 days per year of sick time, paid top-up to EI/QPIP benefits up to 100% of base salary when you welcome a new child (12 weeks for maternity, and 4 weeks for parental/adoption leave), extended health/dental/vision coverage, life insurance, disability insurance, retirement plan to regular full-time employees. Certain roles may also be eligible for bonus and equity.