Distinguished AI Engineer

mymoose; United States; On-site; USD 300,000 - 500,000; Full time

Job summary

Rapid7 seeks a Distinguished AI Engineer to set the multi-year AI technology strategy for its security platform and lead cross-organizational execution. You will be an authority on LLMs and agentic AI systems, guiding decisions from architecture to deployment and safety practices.

You will mentor senior leaders and represent Rapid7 in the AI/security community. You will shape the roadmap, model strategy, and investments, balancing build/buy/partner choices while ensuring scalable, secure AI

Qualifications

• 16+ years software or ML engineering experience, including 2+ years leading the design of production LLM or agentic AI systems.
• Track record of defining technical strategy and platforms with company-wide impact.
• Authoritative, leading-edge expertise in LLMs and AI systems, including transformer architecture and inference optimization.
• Deep breadth across predictive AI and ML, with judgments on where each approach fits by accuracy, latency and cost.
• Experience shaping evaluation strategy, safety and responsible-AI practices.

Responsibilities

• Define the multi-year AI technology strategy and roadmap across the security platform and wider product.
• Shape company-wide model strategy, including build/buy/partner decisions and frontier model investments.
• Sponsor high-impact AI initiatives and unblock hardest technical problems.
• Establish engineering, evaluation, and responsible-AI standards for Rapid7's AI systems.
• Partner with executive leadership to align AI strategy with business goals and customer needs.
• Mentor Senior Principal, Principal and Staff engineers to build a leadership bench.
• Represent Rapid7 as a voice in AI and security with customers and industry.

Skills

LLM/AI systems

Transformer architecture

Strategy & leadership

Mentoring engineers

Communication

Education

PhD in CS/ML/AI or equivalent

Tools

AWS

Job description

Our Engineering organization is scaling its AI Engineering capabilities under new leadership, creating an opportunity to define the future of AI at Rapid7. We're looking for Distinguished AI Engineers to set the long-term technical vision for LLM and agentic AI systems, shaping how AI transforms our products, platforms and engineering capabilities. Operating at the highest level of technical leadership, you'll influence organization-wide strategy and investment, drive innovation across the most complex and consequential challenges, and establish the technical direction and standards that enable Rapid7 to deliver differentiated value for our global customers. You'll also elevate engineering excellence across the organization through thought leadership, mentorship and influence.

About the Team

AI is reshaping cybersecurity on both sides. Attackers can use AI to strike at machine speed, and only AI-powered defense can keep up. At the same time, organizations can only adopt AI with confidence if it is secure. Rapid7 sits at the intersection of security and AI, and we are building industry-defining products for this new era.

Rapid7's AI Engineering team builds the AI that powers our security platform. We are AI engineers and applied scientists who take models from research to production, combining open-source and frontier LLMs, AI agents, and fast predictive models with more than 20 years of Rapid7 security expertise. Our work drives core use cases across Detection and Response, such as alert triage, threat investigation, and automated response, and Exposure and Remediation, such as vulnerability prioritization, attack surface risk assessment, and guided remediation. Together, these help customers stop threats faster and fix what matters most.

About the Role

As a Distinguished AI Engineer, your primary responsibility will be to set the multi-year AI technology strategy for Rapid7's security platform and ensure it is executed across multiple organizations, solving the problems that will define our competitive position. You are an authority on LLMs and agentic systems from transformer internals through training, fine-tuning and inference at scale, you stay close to the hardest technical problems. You know where LLMs shine and where they fall short, and you treat them as one tool in the AI toolbox, alongside predictive AI and classical ML, architecting the right approach for each problem.

Specifically your focus will be to:

• Define the AI technology vision, architecture strategy and multi-year roadmap across Detection and Response, Exposure and Remediation and the wider platform
• Shape company-wide investment and model strategy, including where to build, buy or partner, and which frontier, open-source and in-house model capabilities to invest in
• Sponsor and guide the highest-risk, highest-impact AI initiatives across multiple organisations, stepping into the hardest technical problems to unblock them
• Establish the engineering, evaluation and responsible-AI standards that govern how every AI system at Rapid7 is built, evaluated and released
• Partner with executive leadership to align AI strategy with business strategy, product direction and customer needs
• Anticipate shifts in AI and the threat landscape, and drive the changes Rapid7 needs to make in response
• Mentor and develop Senior Principal, Principal and Staff engineers, building a deep bench of AI engineering leadership
• Represent Rapid7 as a recognised voice in AI and security with customers, partners, researchers and the industry

The skills and qualities you'll bring include:

• 16+ years of software or ML engineering experience, including 2+ years leading the design of production LLM or agentic AI systems. A PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI or a related field is preferred, or equivalent depth of expertise demonstrated through industry experience and technical contributions
• A track record of defining technical strategy and platforms that shaped products or businesses at company scale, with company-wide impact through technical leadership, mentoring and standards
• Authoritative, leading-edge expertise in LLMs and AI systems, including transformer architecture, training, post-training, evaluation and inference optimization at scale
• Deep technical breadth across predictive AI, classical ML, distributed systems and data platforms, with the judgment to make efficient, transparent decisions about where each approach fits based on accuracy, latency, cost and risk
• Experience shaping evaluation strategy, safety and responsible-AI practices for LLM and agent systems
• Experience scaling AI workloads in production, ideally on AWS, with a command of how infrastructure choices drive quality, latency and cost
• Takes accountability for long-term technical direction and outcomes, anticipating strategic risks, driving resolution of the most consequential challenges and ensuring AI investments deliver sustained business and customer value
• An exceptional communicator who