Founding Research Engineer

Acceler8 Talent; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Acceler8 Talent is seeking a Founding Research Engineer to join a fast-growing defence AI startup in a founding capacity. You will build quantitative prediction and agent-learning systems for AI-powered cyber operations, handling noisy time-series data and complex representations.

You’ll work on streaming data infrastructure, statistical and deep learning models, and contribute to shaping the technical team as the company scales. Cybersecurity domain experience is not required.

Qualifications

• Strong empirical judgement and hands-on coding ability.
• Experience with noisy time-series, signal processing or behavioural modelling.
• Personally owned models from hypothesis through deployment.
• Comfortable with both statistical methods and deep learning.
• High-agency and effective in ambiguous environments.
• Cybersecurity experience is not required.

Responsibilities

• PB-scale multimodal time-series data refreshing in under a second.
• Building streaming and data-capture infrastructure.
• Creating useful representations from noisy, unstructured signals.
• Modelling actor behaviour using statistical models, deep learning and transformers.
• Training agents against sparse, long-horizon rewards.

Job description

Founding Research Engineer, AI & Defence | Quantitative Research | Applied ML

I'm partnering with a fast-growing defence AI startup to hire a Founding Research Engineer

You’ll be building quantitative prediction and agent-learning systems designed to detect and conduct a novel class of AI-powered cyber operation

What you’ll be working on:

• PB-scale multimodal time-series data refreshing in under a second
• Building streaming and data-capture infrastructure
• Creating useful representations from noisy, unstructured signals
• Modelling actor behaviour using statistical models, deep learning and transformers
• Training agents against sparse, long-horizon rewards

Why join?

• Founding-level ownership across research and production
• Revenue-generating company solving national-scale problems
• Backed by Tier 1 seed investors with significant runway
• Work alongside experienced quantitative and cybersecurity specialists
• Opportunity to help shape the technical team as the company scales

Ideal candidate:

• Quantitative researcher, developer or applied ML engineer
• Strong empirical judgement and hands-on coding ability
• Experience with noisy time-series, signal processing or behavioural modelling
• Personally owned models from hypothesis through deployment
• Comfortable with both statistical methods and deep learning
• High-agency and effective in ambiguous environments
• Cybersecurity experience is not required