Lead Adversarial Engineer

Surge AI; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Surge AI in the United States is seeking a Lead Adversarial Engineer to run end-to-end red-team exercises against frontier models. You’ll scope threat models, design campaigns, recruit operators, and synthesize results into risk pictures and readouts.

You’ll build an operational engine that surfaces failures under realistic constraints, turning messy attack spaces into disciplined tests and driving cross-functional execution from kickoff to readout.

Qualifications

• Red-Team leadership experience with adversarial campaigns and playbooks
• Methodical design of scenarios, controls, and metrics
• Ability to brief partners and translate results into remediation plans

Responsibilities

• Stand up recurring red-team cadence with targets and campaigns
• Create scenario banks and taxonomies for breadth and depth
• Produce executive readouts with severity, exploitability, and learning artifacts
• Partner with research, product, and ops to validate fixes and run regressions

Skills

Red-Team Leadership

Experimentation Design

Stakeholder Communication

Threat Modeling

Job description

About Us

Our mission is to raise AGI with the richness of human intelligence — curious, witty, imaginative, and full of unexpected brilliance.

Surge was founded by engineers and researchers who dreamed of building the next generation AI. We're building a platform that powers the most powerful models in the world in partnership with companies like Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

At Surge, we believe the path to AGI isn't just about scaling compute—it's about embracing the unlimited ceiling of human intelligence and creativity in the data that shapes these systems. Our platform combines elite human expertise with cutting‑edge tools for scalable oversight, from building rich RL environments to conducting rigorous evaluations that go beyond benchmarks. We've run a profitable business from day one without raising venture funding.

The Role

As a Lead Adversarial Engineer, you’ll run end-to-end red‑teaming workstreams against frontier models — scoping threat models, designing campaigns, coordinating operators, and synthesizing results into clear risk pictures and decision‑ready reports. You’ll orchestrate structured adversarial exercises across modalities and tools, ensuring coverage, reproducibility, and crisp learning loops.

You won’t just find failures — you’ll build the operational engine that repeatedly surfaces them under realistic constraints. This is a role for someone who thrives on program design, loves turning messy attack spaces into disciplined test plans, and can drive cross‑functional execution from kickoff to readout.

What You'll Do

• Stand up a recurring red‑team cadence: scoping targets, recruiting operators, defining success criteria, and executing multi‑week campaigns

• Create scenario banks and attack taxonomies; ensuring breadth/depth coverage and tracking families of exploits across versions and contexts

• Produce executive readouts and issue trackers that distill severity, exploitability, and user harm, with crisp reproduction steps and artifacts

• Partner with research, product, and ops teams to validate fixes and rerun focused regressions; maintaining dashboards for trendlines and residual risk
  

What We’re Looking for

• Red‑Team Program Leadership – Experience planning and running adversarial campaigns (jailbreaks, prompt injection, tool abuse), including playbooks, ops cadence, and after‑action reviews

• Methodical Experimentation – Strength in designing scenarios, controls, and metrics; comfort triaging findings and prioritizing next passes based on evidence

• Stakeholder Command – Ability to brief partners, align on objectives, and translate results into actionable remediation tracks with clear owners and timelines