AI Engineer: Offensive Security Agents

Zealot; United States; On-site; USD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive cash

Meaningful early equity

Solving hard problems

Job summary

Zealot is seeking an AI Systems Engineer to develop emulation interfaces for agents, focusing on systems programming and binary analysis. Ideal candidates should have experience with C/C++, Rust, and various emulation stacks. U.S. citizenship with TS/SCI clearance eligibility is required. Zealot offers competitive compensation and significant equity, working on challenging problems with a meaningful mission.

Qualifications

• 2–3+ years of experience in systems programming and ML infrastructure.
• Proven comfort with binary analysis and memory corruption.
• Hands-on experience with agent harnesses at scale.

Responsibilities

• Build emulation interfaces for agents to reason over.
• Wire instrumentation and fuzzing into tool interfaces.
• Evaluate and benchmark infrastructure.

Skills

Systems programming (C/C++, Rust)

Binary analysis and memory corruption

Agent harnesses orchestration

Emulation stacks (QEMU, Unicorn, etc.)

Reverse engineering (GDB, IDA, Ghidra)

Job description

AI Systems Engineer: Offensive Security Agents

Zealot (zealotlabs.com) builds AI systems that find zero-days, emulate target devices, and develop working exploits for U.S. defense and intelligence customers. We're backed by tier-1 U.S. venture firms and industry leaders, and our team includes alumni of Anthropic, xAI, NSA, USCYBERCOM, Anduril, Unit 8200, and the Mossad.

What you'll do

We're hiring an engineer who lives at the intersection of low-level systems and LLM-driven agents — someone who can read a binary and build the harness that lets an agent do the same. That means wiring emulation (QEMU, Unicorn, Qiling), instrumentation (Frida, DynamoRIO), fuzzing, and exploit primitives into tool interfaces for agents to reason over, as well as the evaluation & benchmarking infrastructure.

What we're looking for

• 2–3+ years across systems programming (C/C++, Rust) and ML infrastructure
• Comfort with binary analysis, memory corruption classes, and modern mitigations (ASLR, CFI, PAC, MTE)
• Hands-on work with agent harnesses — orchestration, tool-use, eval loops — in production or at benchmark scale
• Fluency with at least one emulation stack (QEMU, Unicorn, Qiling, PANDA, FirmAE)
• Strong RE / debugger chops (GDB, IDA or Ghidra) and the patience to use them

Nice to have

Pwn-heavy CTF experience (DEF CON finals, PPP, DiceGang, Shellphish, Theori, Team Atlanta), public CVEs, conference talks, AIxCC / CGC participation, or kernel / baseband RE.

Read this part carefully

That list is what the fully-formed version of this role looks like. It's not a filter. If you're sharp, hungry, and funny, apply anyway — even if half the bullets read like a foreign language today. Tech can be learned. Spirit cannot. We've watched the right people pick up binary exploitation from scratch and outship ten-year veterans inside a year. Tell us what you've taught yourself recently and what you'd tear into first here.

Requirements

U.S. citizenship. TS/SCI clearance eligibility (existing preferred).

What we offer

• Competitive cash, meaningful early equity, a mission that matters, and hard problems nobody has solved yet.