Founding Security Research AI Agent Security

Location: Manhattan NYC 3444 days onsite
Compensation: $150K$300K base plus meaningful founding-stage equity
Employment: Full-time

A three-person seed-stage AI-security startup is building the detection and response layer for enterprise AI agents.

As AI agents increasingly operate across developer endpoints CI pipelines cloud environments and autonomous workflows security teams lack a unified view of what those agents are doing. The companys platform provides runtime telemetry behavioral detections investigation capabilities and policy controls designed specifically for this emerging attack surface.

The company is backed by experienced early-stage investors and security and engineering leaders from several category-defining technology companies.

The company is hiring its Founding Security Research Lead to establish its security-research function from the ground up.

Youll work directly with the founders to reproduce emerging attacks discover new techniques build offensive tooling publish original research and translate those findings into production detections. This is a hands-on builder role with significant influence over the research roadmap product direction and the broader development of AI-agent security as a category.

• Investigate real-world attacks targeting AI agents and autonomous systems
• Discover new attack techniques involving coding agents MCPs CI pipelines cloud environments developer tooling credentials and permissions
• Reverse engineer unfamiliar binaries runtimes protocols and closed-source systems
• Build proof-of-concept exploits research harnesses fuzzers sandboxes and other offensive tooling
• Reproduce and technically analyze emerging AI-security incidents
• Publish credible research through technical writeups disclosures conference presentations and open-source tools
• Convert offensive findings into production-grade behavioral detections
• Develop detection methodologies for prompt injection tool abuse privilege escalation credential access persistence and data exfiltration
• Establish the companys research infrastructure operating processes and technical roadmap
• Help determine what should be published disclosed privately open-sourced or incorporated into the product

• Approximately five or more years of experience in security research vulnerability research exploit development offensive security reverse engineering or technically deep red teaming
• A record of original publicly reviewable security research such as CVEs technical writeups papers conference presentations or offensive open-source tooling
• Hands-on binary or closed-source reverse-engineering experience using Ghidra IDA Pro Binary Ninja or comparable tools
• Strong coding ability and experience building research tooling independently
• Proficiency in a systems language such as Rust C C or Go
• Experience translating research into exploits detections tools product capabilities or operational security outcomes
• Ability to select high-value research problems and operate effectively without an established roadmap or large supporting team
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Availability to work from the Manhattan office three to four days per week

• AI agents agent runtimes LLM applications MCP coding assistants or AI infrastructure
• Malware Malware Malware analysis sandboxing fuzzing firmware research or endpoint security
• Behavioral detection engineering involving EDRDRDR SIEM cloud security or runtime telemetry
• eBPF system instrumentation identity permissions credentials or cloud attack paths
• Widely adopted security tooling tooling or field-recognized research
• Presentations at Black Hat DEF CON USENIX or comparable security conferences conferences
• Experience establishing a research program or joining a cybersecurity company at an early stage

• Define an emerging category at the intersection of offensive security and AI infrastructure
• Build the security-research function from zero
• Work directly with the founding team
• Turn original research into real product capabilities
• Receive meaningful ownership and founding-stage equity
• Publish research that helps shape how enterprises secure autonomous AI systems