Junior Engineer - Working Student Thesis

About Gen

Gen is a global company dedicated to powering Digital Freedom through its trusted consumer brands including Norton, Avast, LifeLock, MoneyLion and more. Our combined heritage is rooted in financial empowerment and cyber safety for the first digital generations, and today we deliver award-winning cybersecurity, online privacy, identity protection and financial wellness solutions to nearly 500 million users in more than 150 countries.

Together, we share a collective passion and vision to protect consumers and help them grow, manage and secure their digital and financial lives. We’re always looking for smart, fearless and high-impact talent who see AI as a teammate – leveraging it to move faster and deliver meaningful results.

When you’re part of Gen, you’ll have the flexibility, tools and support to do your best work and grow your career – from flexible working options and time off to competitive pay, benefits and well-being programs.

At Gen, we are scrappy and relentlessly customer driven. We create room for healthy debate, experimentation and continuous learning, and we seek out people with different experiences, identities and ideas to join our team. You’ll work with people who back each other, respect each other and understand that our differences are a competitive advantage.

If this sounds like you, we’d love you to be part of Gen.

About the Role

A suspicious web redirect is often just one step in a much larger chain. A traffic distribution system (TDS) decides where a visitor goes next based on signals such as their browser, location, referrer, or previous activity. In malicious campaigns, this can make the infrastructure difficult to observe and the final destination difficult to reach consistently.

In this student position, you will investigate TDS infrastructure, understand its routing logic, and develop tools to capture browser activity, reconstruct redirection chains, and map the relationships between their components. The aim is to build a reusable approach to understanding how different TDS instances route visitors from an entry point to a final destination. The work will form the basis of your diploma thesis at Gen.

With guidance from the team, you will develop your malware analysis and reverse engineering skills while using AI to help build and validate tooling for TDS research.

Key Responsibilities

• Analyze TDS infrastructure and investigate how it routes malicious traffic
• Reverse engineer and deobfuscate JavaScript to understand routing and evasion techniques
• Inspect and modify HTTP traffic, including headers, cookies, and redirects, using Chrome DevTools, Fiddler, Burp Suite, or similar tools
• Use AI to help develop and validate tools in JavaScript, Python, or other scripting languages for automated analysis and infrastructure mapping
• Test your findings and document the methods and results in your diploma thesis
• Perform other duties as instructed by your supervisor

Interview Structure

The following steps have already been completed for the current candidate:

• Two discussions, one 60-minute session and one 30-minute session, covering the student's current skills, the homework assignment, mutual expectations, and the initial thesis direction
• A practical homework assignment, which the student successfully passed
• Initial alignment on a TDS-related diploma thesis; the detailed research question, deliverables, and evaluation criteria remain to be defined together