Cybersecurity AI Research Lead

Axia; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Axia is seeking a Research Lead in Cybersecurity and AI to fuse deep cybersecurity knowledge with rigorous AI research methods. You will shape the cyber research agenda, collaborating with the CTO/CISO, CAIO and Head of AI Research to build evaluations and data that quantify security capabilities.

The role covers AI for cybersecurity and securing AI agents, exploring offensive and defensive workflows within authorized environments, and assessing how tool access, permissions, context and

Qualifications

• Substantial hands-on depth in at least one security discipline, such as vulnerability research, program analysis, application security, cloud and identity security, detection engineering, incident response or adversary emulation.
• Evidence of research ability through papers, disclosed vulnerabilities, reproducible technical investigations, open-source tools or rigorous experiments.
• Direct experience evaluating or training AI systems for security, or a strong security research record paired with demonstrable implementation of LLM-agent evaluations and working knowledge of RL rewards and post-training.
• Strong Python and Linux skills; familiarity with containerized workloads, networked systems, telemetry and reproducible experiments.
• Ability to reason about attacker actions and defender evidence, and to explain what a benchmark result does and does not establish about enterprise readiness.

Responsibilities

• Create realistic research tasks. Translate vulnerabilities, incident patterns and security workflows into reproducible environments.
• Measure defensive work. Build tasks for vulnerability triage, secure patching, patch regression, detection engineering, threat hunting, incident investigation and recovery.
• Study cyber agents. Compare model and scaffold configurations under controlled budgets.
• Design trustworthy verifiers. Validate intended state changes and constraints, accept legitimate alternative solutions, and test for false passes, false failures, leakage and reward exploits.
• Develop training signals. Build expert and model trajectories, reward functions and curricula for SFT and RL.
• Make enterprise realism measurable. Include varied controls, realistic background activity, incomplete telemetry and organization-specific restrictions.
• Protect experimental validity. Separate capability failure, policy refusal, infrastructure failure and ambiguous task design.
• Publish useful research artifacts. Produce documented benchmark releases, failure analyses and lab-facing reports.

Skills

Security depth

Research ability

AI security experience

Python

Linux

Threat modeling

Education

PhD optional

Tools

Containerization

Experiment tooling

Job description

Axia is seeking a Research Lead in Cybersecurity and AI to fuse deep cybersecurity knowledge with rigorous AI research methods. You will shape the cyber research agenda, collaborating with the CTO/CISO, CAIO and Head of AI Research to build evaluations and data that quantify security capabilities.

The role covers AI for cybersecurity and securing AI agents, exploring offensive and defensive workflows within authorized environments, and assessing how tool access, permissions, context and