Director - Lead Agentic AI Security Research

CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc.; Washington; Hybrid; USD 195,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Market leader compensation

Wellness programs

Vacation and holidays

Paid parental leaves

Professional development

Employee networks

Office culture

Great Place to Work Certified

Job summary

CrowdStrike is seeking an applied research lead to advance agentic AI for cybersecurity. You will guide scientific direction, supervise teams of scientists and engineers, and push state-of-the-art research from concept to product, balancing hands-on work with strategic leadership.

You’ll design evaluation and verification methods, work with security colleagues, and ensure rigorous experimentation to validate AI-driven defenses and tools across complex environments.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in computer science, computer engineering, or similar quantitative field.
• 10+ years of experience in data science, ML/DL, or AI with a focus on large-scale data problems.
• Hands‑on expertise in modern LLM post-training techniques.
• Demonstrated research contributions to or experience building agentic systems.
• Strong evaluation discipline (designing, extending, or validating methodologies).
• A leadership style that values hands‑on contributions at every level, including your own.

Responsibilities

• Lead the research agenda for agentic AI systems across cybersecurity use cases.
• Drive original research on efficient models tuned for security workflows, including post-training and data curation strategies.
• Personally lead the experimental work on the most ambiguous problems.
• Establish a rigorous evaluation, verification, and validation methodology for models and end-to-end systems.
• Partner with security researchers, threat intel, detection engineering, and product to ground applied research in operator workflows.
• Define abstractions for the skills and tools agents use in practical security contexts.
• Advance the science of agent design, including harnesses, planning, memory, tool use, and multi-step reasoning.
• Contribute novel techniques back to the field through publications and standards.

Skills

Research leadership

Agentic AI

LLM post-training

Evaluation methods

Mentoring

Education

MS or PhD in computer science or computer engineering

Job description

CrowdStrike is seeking an applied research lead to advance agentic AI for cybersecurity. You will guide scientific direction, supervise teams of scientists and engineers, and push state-of-the-art research from concept to product, balancing hands-on work with strategic leadership.

You’ll design evaluation and verification methods, work with security colleagues, and ensure rigorous experimentation to validate AI-driven defenses and tools across complex environments.