Cybersecurity Research Engineer: AI-Driven Security Labs

Collinear AI, Inc.; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Collinear AI, Inc. is growing its cybersecurity team and seeks a hands-on engineer to design executable security environments, real repositories, and verifiable tasks for AI agents. You will own the project from scenario to runnable setup and verifier.

You bring deep cybersecurity know-how and strong Python and systems programming skills. No AI/ML background required; we will teach our tooling and evaluation workflows. Recent grads are encouraged to apply.

Qualifications

• Hands-on cybersecurity knowledge with strong programming skills.
• Ability to read unfamiliar code, reproduce issues, and implement fixes.
• Experience with Python and at least one systems language (C/C++, Go, Java, JS/TS, or Rust).
• Familiarity with Linux, Git, containers, debugging, and automated testing.
• Recent graduates or early-career engineers encouraged to apply; PhD not required.

Responsibilities

• Build cybersecurity environments. Create isolated, reproducible environments with real repositories, applications, services, logs, and access controls.
• Turn security work into tasks. Design scenarios around vulnerability discovery and remediation, application and API security, authentication and authorization, incident investigation, and system hardening.
• Develop reference solutions and verifiers. Reproduce the underlying issue, implement a valid solution, and write checks that distinguish a real fix from a superficial workaround.
• Test the tests. Challenge graders with incomplete fixes, disabled features, hard-coded answers, and other shortcuts.
• Run and analyze agents. Evaluate frontier models, inspect their tool calls and code changes, and explain where their security reasoning or execution breaks down.
• Contribute to benchmarks and research. Work with researchers and engineers to turn strong environments into evaluation suites and training data.

Skills

Python

C/C++

Go

Java

JavaScript/TypeScript

Rust

Linux

Git

Containers

Debugging

Automated testing

Code analysis

Job description

Collinear AI, Inc. is growing its cybersecurity team and seeks a hands-on engineer to design executable security environments, real repositories, and verifiable tasks for AI agents. You will own the project from scenario to runnable setup and verifier.

You bring deep cybersecurity know-how and strong Python and systems programming skills. No AI/ML background required; we will teach our tooling and evaluation workflows. Recent grads are encouraged to apply.