AI Security Researcher

Apollo Research; Greater London; On-site; GBP 140,000 - 188,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation support (UK/US)

Flexible work hours

Unlimited vacation

Competitive salary + equity

Job summary

Apollo Research in London and globally is seeking an AI Security Researcher to identify and remediate risks from AI agents, and to redefine insider-risk controls for the security of our workflows and products.

You will red-team internal surfaces, design novel threat mitigations, and translate findings into automated checks and CI/CD integrations. This hands-on role demands coding chops, sharp threat modelling, and clear written reporting.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in security roles with hands-on technical work (not only GRC).
• Direct experience with offensive security, threat modelling, red teaming.
• Engineering mindset: translate findings into fixes, automation, CI/CD integrations.
• Comfortable in a fast-moving startup environment with ambiguity and changing priorities.
• Strong written communication; produces threat models, reports and docs.

Responsibilities

• Red-team Apollo’s internal software, infrastructure and AI agent controls; build realistic attack trajectories.
• Design solutions for novel AI security threats; set the security posture standard.
• Track attacker tactics and translate intelligence into high-signal detections.
• Own findings through to deployed fixes; socialize and ensure durable controls.

Skills

Offensive security

Threat modelling

Code reading

Security engineering

Startup pace

Technical writing

Job description

THE OPPORTUNITY

Apollo Research works with most frontier AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines and others) to test their models before deployment and collaborate on fundamental scheming research. Our coding agent security product, Watcher, is deployed in production and monitors billions of agent tokens per month across engineering teams at agent-building scale-ups and enterprise.

Security exists at Apollo to safeguard the trust frontier labs place in us and to enable that research. Our own team uses AI agents extensively across its work, which makes Apollo both a target and a testbed. We’re hiring AI Security Researchers to join the Infra & Security Team.

In this role, you will identify, research and remediate both conventional threats and the novel risks introduced by AI agents that can affect Apollo and our mission. You will redefine and work on a new class of insider risk that didn’t exist before.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Hold responsibility for the security of Apollo’s internal surfaces. Red-team internal software, infrastructure, and AI agent access controls/monitoring. Build realistic attack trajectories.

• Design solutions for novel or emerging threats in the AI security space, where no existing playbook applies. Set the standard for our security posture in these areas.

• Track adversary tactics, techniques, and campaigns relevant to Apollo’s threat landscape, and translate that intelligence into tuned, high-signal detections.

• Own each finding through to a deployed fix. Build and roll out durable controls: checks, tests, defaults, detections. Socialise them, work with engineers to implement, and hold remediation to a high bar.

KEY REQUIREMENTS

Must haves

• 5+ years in security roles in a hands-on technical capacity (not purely GRC/compliance). You’d need to be able to think structurally about threat modelling and failure modes. You need to be able to read code, understand infrastructure, and evaluate technical controls.

• Direct experience with offensive security. Threat modelling, red teaming, etc. Knowledge of application or cloud. Ideally you owned or significantly contributed to the security posture of an organisation or product that handles sensitive customer data.

• Engineering mindset. You treat security as an engineering problem. You can translate your findings into fixes and controls, such as paved roads, custom detection rules, adversarial test suites, CI/CD integrations. You prioritize automation and systems-level thinking to scale security, and you are comfortable leveraging AI to accelerate development.

• Startup pace. You are excited about a fast-moving environment, comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities, and willing to grind when it matters.

• Strong written communication. This role produces a lot of artifacts (threat models, reports, failure mode documentation) and they need to be clear and precise.

Nice to haves

• Experience with AI/ML systems security or LLM security.

• Detection engineering, SOC, or incident analysis experience.

• Familiarity with insider threat programs or insider risk frameworks.

Explicitly not required

• Formal AI safety research background. We need security practitioners who can learn the AI safety context, not AI safety researchers who need to learn security.

REPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS

• Red-team Apollo’s agent sandboxes used for evals: Test whether an agent can escape isolation, exfiltrate data, detect it’s being evaluated, or otherwise undermine the validity of eval results. Your findings will harden the sandbox infrastructure the research team depends on to trust its own eval results.

• Comprehensive coding agent threat model : Map every way a coding agent with internal access: credentials, code, network, execution ability, could attack Apollo, benchmarked against what a human insider with the same access could do.

BENEFITS

• This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.

• Salary: San Francisco : $214,000 – $280,000; London : £144,000 – £188,000

• Our engineers effectively have an unlimited token budget. If a better result costs more compute, use it.

• Flexible work hours and schedule

• Unlimited vacation

• Unlimited sick leave

• Up to 6 months of paid parental leave

• Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance

• Retirement savings with competitive employer matching (e.g. 401(k) for US employees)

• Lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays

• Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences

• A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget

• Relocation support and visa fees (if applicable)

LOGISTICS

• Time Allocation: Full-time

• Location: This is an in-person role working out of our London or San Francisco office. We offer flexible working hours and some wfh arrangements.

• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in both the UK and US. Sponsorship isn’t guaranteed for every role or candidate, but if we make you an offer, we’ll work with you to find the right visa route.

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Infra and Security team is currently led by Rusheb Shah and consists of Glen Rodgersand Steven Lee. You will work closely with Security Engineers we’re hiring for as well as technical staff from the Scheming Research and Product team. You can find our full team here.

ABOUT APOLLO RESEARCH

The rapid rise in AI capabilities offers tremendous opportunities, but also presents significant risks. At Apollo Research, we’re primarily concerned with risks from Loss of Control, i.e. risks coming from the model itself rather than e.g. humans misusing the AI. We’re particularly concerned with deceptive alignment / scheming, a phenomenon where a model appears to be aligned but is, in fact, misaligned and capable of evading human oversight.

We work on the science of scheming, detection of scheming (e.g. building evaluations), and scheming mitigations (e.g. anti-scheming). We also work on control and monitoring research (see our scalable monitoring agenda). We work closely with many frontier AI companies, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines and others, e.g. to test their models and collaborate on the science of scheming. At Apollo, we aim for a culture that emphasizes truth-seeking, being goal-oriented, giving and receiving constructive feedback, and being friendly and helpful. If you’re interested in more details about what it’s like working at Apollo, you can find more information here.

We also build a coding agent security product called Watcher that secures agent deployments in companies. Our goal is to reduce the probability of catastrophic incidents by securing coding agents, learning about their real-world risks, and publishing our research on how to build these control systems most effectively.

Equality Statement: Apollo Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and are committed to providing equal opportunities to all, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.