AI Research Engineer (Tool Calling Safety)

StackOne; London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A fast-growing technology startup in London is seeking an AI Research Engineer to enhance the security of tool-calling systems. The role involves researching vulnerabilities, designing safeguards, and working closely with the engineering team to implement robust solutions. Candidates should have experience in AI and security engineering and a passion for innovation. This position offers excellent benefits, including private health insurance and a flexible working environment.

Benefits

25 days holiday + additional days

Employee share options

Private health insurance

Home office setup allowance

Paid lunch in the office

Annual team offsite

Qualifications

• Knowledge of prompt injection and security engineering principles.
• Experience with API auditing and development.
• Ability to design defenses for agent systems.

Responsibilities

• Investigate vulnerabilities in tool-calling protocols.
• Design mechanisms to restrict unsafe tool calls.
• Collaborate on the architecture of a secure execution engine.

Skills

prompt injection

security engineering

Gen AI

API development

real-time agent systems

Tools

AWS

Python

Typescript

Node.js

React

Job description

About StackOne

StackOne is the integration gateway for SaaS & AI Agents. We\'ve raised $24m in 2 years, and we\'re backed by top tier investors like Google Ventures and Workday Ventures. Our customers are established SaaS companies & small to large businesses building AI Agents.

About the role

We\'re building a world where users of any SaaS can integrate with the tool of their choice in one click thanks to StackOne. We\'re convinced AI is pivotal to making this a reality by transforming how Software talks to each other and this is what you will help achieve.

We\'re looking for an AI Research Engineer to secure the next generation of tool-calling for LLMs. You\'ll research and prototype defences that limit the attack surface of emerging standards such as MCP servers, and make tool execution safer against prompt injection and malicious calls.

You\'ll work with our researchers on state-of-the-art tool-calling models, and with our engineers on the execution engine that runs them.

You will own, design and run experiments on cutting-edge architectures, manage distributed training clusters, and help curate & generate high-quality datasets. This role sits closer to the research/ML infra side than product engineering, but with a strong mandate for applied, production-ready results.

In this role, you will work with wider AI team of StackOne (comprising of other researchers and engineers) and report directly to the CTO.

Responsibilities

• Investigate vulnerabilities in tool-calling protocols (MCP, OpenAPI, custom plug-ins).
• Design and test mechanisms to restrict malicious or unsafe tool calls.
• Collaborate on the architecture of a secure tool execution engine.
• Partner with the core research team to align safety work with model quality.
• Design and manage synthetic data generation workflows to augment real-world datasets.
• Develop tools for dataset curation, labeling, filtering, and augmentation.
• Conduct benchmarking, and evaluations to measure fine-tuning impact.
• Collaborate with the rest of the engineering team to integrate fine-tuned models into production stacks.
• Stay ahead of research in parameter-efficient fine-tuning, synthetic data, and LLM training.

What we\'re looking for

• Knowledge of prompt injection, sandboxing, and least-privilege patterns.
• Experience building or auditing APIs, plug-ins, or protocol runtimes.
• Ability to design and evaluate defences for real-time agent systems.
• Background in Gen AI, with experience with Tool Calling
• Interest in security engineering, or applied cryptography.
• Desire to work in a fast-paced startup, taking ownership of projects e2e and bias towards shipping.

Our Stack

You will have a lot of freedom and agency to chose and work with the technologies you love. Our tech stack includes:

• Infra & monitoring: AWS (ECS, RDS, Elasticache, Lambda etc.), Cloudflare, Tinybird, Modal, Dagster, Langsmith, Datadog, Sentry, Incident.io
• Languages & Frameworks: Typescript (Node.js), Python, NestJS, React, Svelte
• Other day-to-day Tools: Postman, Notion, Slack, Jira, Github and more

Benefits

• 25 days holiday + 1 additional day holiday per year of tenure
• Participation in the company\'s employee share options plan
• Private health insurance (including dental & optical)
• Health, fitness and gift card discounts
• £1,000 for your home office set up + £500/year top-up
• Paid lunch in the office
• Annual team offsite to sunny spots (last ones were in Spain and Portugal)
• Join one of Europe\'s fastest-growing startups
• Work with a veteran team of ex-employees of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Coinbase, JP Morgan and more
• Cycle2Work and Electric Cars scheme
• Hybrid work set up - typically 2d in the office

Ready to help us change the game for SaaS integrations? Get in touch and let\'s chat!

We believe diversity drives innovation. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply. As an equal-opportunity employer, we celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.