Founding AI Engineer — AI Cyber-Security Start-Up

ManticoreAI; United States; Remote; USD 100,000 - 720,000; Full time

Job summary

ManticoreAI, an innovative startup, seeks a Founding AI Engineer to build cutting-edge AI tools for cyber security. This role involves designing AI agents capable of executing penetration tests and ensuring ethical practices while collaborating closely with teams to advance product development. The successful candidate will have a strong background in Python and experience in pentesting, with the opportunity to influence the direction of a unique SaaS product in an exciting startup environment.

Benefits

Founding-Team Equity

Remote-First Flexibility

High Autonomy & Impact

Hardware & Learning Budget

Mission-Driven Culture

Qualifications

• Proven experience in building complex AI agents or autonomous pipelines.
• Hands-on knowledge of pentest frameworks like Metasploit and Burp.
• Comfortable with Linux internals and network security.

Responsibilities

• Design and architect agent frameworks for automated penetration tests.
• Orchestrate system tools and enforce ethical guardrails.
• Collaborate with red-teamers to validate findings and improve agent logic.

Skills

Python

Pentest Expertise

LLM Know-How

Systems & Security Savvy

Agentic-AI Chops

Startup DNA

Job description

Founding AI Engineer — AI Cyber-Security Start-Up

Founding AI Engineer — AI Cyber-Security Start-Up

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We’re a early stage startup on a mission to reinvent offensive security. Our platform pairs proprietary large-language-model (LLM) agents with classic tooling to autonomously plan and execute penetration tests for global enterprises. Early pilots with tier-one enterprises prove the tech works; now we’re expanding our founding team to turn a robust prototype into an industry-defining SaaS.

Why This Role Matters

LLMs alone don’t break systems—agents that can reason, plan, and safely wield real-world security tools do. You will architect those agents: the brains that discover vulnerabilities, chain exploits, and generate expert-grade reports at machine speed. Your work will sit at the intersection of cutting-edge AI research, hardcore system programming, and practical red-team tradecraft.

What You’ll Own

• Agent Architecture & Orchestration – Design multi-step reasoning, planning, memory, and reflection loops in Python; evaluate or extend frameworks such as LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, or roll your own when needed.
• LLM Integration & Optimization – Combine API-based and on-prem models, fine-tune on pentest data, and build robust fall-backs for cost, latency, and privacy.
• Tool Control Layer – Orchestrate Nmap, Metasploit, Burp, custom exploits, and scanners; normalize and interpret their output for iterative agent reasoning.
• Safety & Ethics Guard-Rails – Enforce target scope, command whitelists, sandboxing, resource quotas, and kill-switches to ensure responsible, deterministic operation.
• System Engineering – Build secure execution sandboxes (Docker/Firecracker), optimize async IO, and scale inference workloads across AWS & Cloudflare Workers.
• Collaboration & Validation – Work hand-in-hand with red-teamers to model real attack paths, validate findings, and continuously harden agent logic.
• Founding Responsibilities – Influence roadmap, coding standards, hiring, and investor demos; document designs with clarity for future team members.

What You Bring

• Proven Agentic-AI Chops – You’ve built complex AI agents or autonomous pipelines, not just toy chatbots.
• Python Mastery – Async programming, type hints, testing culture, clean architecture (SOLID / DDD).
• Pentest Expertise – Hands-on knowledge of reconnaissance, exploitation, post-exploitation and common frameworks (Metasploit, Burp, Nmap).
• LLM Know-How – Prompt engineering, embeddings, vector search, model fine-tuning, performance tuning.
• Systems & Security Savvy – Comfortable with Linux internals, networking, sandbox hardening, and least-privilege design.
• Startup DNA – Bias for action, comfort with ambiguity, willingness to own features end-to-end, clear written and verbal communication.

Nice-to-Haves

• CREST/OSCP/OSEP or comparable certifications.
• Contributions to open-source AI or security tooling.
• Experience with vector DBs (Pinecone, Chroma, Weaviate) or MLOps stacks (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD).
• Cloud fluency (AWS, GCP, Azure) and edge compute (Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects).
• Published research or conference talks (Black Hat, DEF CON, etc.).

What We Offer

• Founding-Team Equity plus competitive cash as funding milestones close.
• Remote-First Flexibility with quarterly strategy sprints in Asia-Pacific.
• High Autonomy & Impact – Your designs will shape the core intellect of the product.
• Hardware & Learning Budget – Conferences, courses, GPUs—whatever lets you operate at peak.
• Mission-Driven Culture – Small, senior team laser-focused on shipping technology that rewrites the rules of cyber offense.

How to Express Interest

Send a brief, confidential note (or LinkedIn DM) with links to a relevant project, paper, or repo and two lines on why autonomous AI security fascinates you. If there’s mutual fit, we’ll schedule an NDA call to dive into vision, tech, and ownership.

Ready to build the brains of the next generation of offensive security? Let’s talk.

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Engineering and Information Technology

• Industries

  Computer and Network Security

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