Member of Technical Staff - Research

Armadin; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full health, dental, vision

Equity ownership

In-office meals

Haircuts at the office

Conferences & events

401(k), HSA, and FSA plans

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Armadin, based in Palo Alto, is seeking a senior researcher to own the post-training strategy and to translate security research into scalable model capabilities. You will drive fine-tuning, reward modeling, and efficiency benchmarks, ensuring reliability and impact across production environments.

The role requires a PhD or equivalent experience with hands-on SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, and distillation. You will collaborate across teams to push frontier research into practical, enterprise-grade solutions.

Qualifications

• PhD in CS, ML, or related field, or equivalent experience with a strong track record.
• Hands-on experience with SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, DPO, and reward modeling.
• Practical ability to train, fine-tune, and evaluate models and deploy research to production.
• Engineering strength to implement ideas and run them at scale.
• Ability to drive strategy broadly or focus deeply on hard problems as needed.
• Strong collaboration across teams and focus on outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own Post-Training Strategy: Drive the post-training roadmap (fine-tuning, preference optimization, reward modeling, RL, distillation) to make models more capable, reliable, and aligned.
• Push Efficiency & Evals: Make models serve reliably at scale, and build the benchmarks that measure quality and catch regressions.
• Ground Research in Reality: Turn our security experts’ tradecraft into model capabilities and ship your techniques into production.
• Stay at the Frontier: Track post-training and efficiency research and bring the best ideas in.

Skills

PhD or equivalent

Post-training techniques

Model training & evaluation

Scale engineering

Strategic thinking

Cross-team collaboration

Education

PhD in CS/ML or related field

Job description

About Us

At Armadin, we’re a group of engineers, researchers, and hackers on a mission to redefine what proactive security can do in the AI era. Cyberattacks are becoming autonomous and relentless and we believe defending against threats before they materialize is one of the most powerful ways to protect the institutions the world depends on.

We’re building autonomous proactive security from the ground up, reinforcing the tradecraft of elite red teamers into purpose-built security models and agents that discover risk and remediate it before organizations are breached.

Led by Kevin Mandia, founder of Mandiant ($5.4B exit to Google), our team brings together researchers and engineers from Google, xAI, Meta, Stanford, and MIT to reinvent security for an adversary that never sleeps.

What You’ll Do

• Own Post-Training Strategy: Drive the post-training roadmap (fine-tuning, preference optimization, reward modeling, RL, distillation) to make models more capable, reliable, and aligned.

• Push Efficiency & Evals: Make models serve reliably at scale, and build the benchmarks that measure quality and catch regressions.

• Ground Research in Reality: Turn our security experts’ tradecraft into model capabilities and ship your techniques into production.

• Stay at the Frontier: Track post-training and efficiency research and bring the best ideas in.

What You’ll Bring

• Research Pedigree: PhD in CS, ML, or related field, or equivalent experience with a strong track record.

• Post-Training Depth: Hands‑on experience with SFT, RLHF/RLAIF, DPO, and reward modeling.

• Practical Results: You train, fine‑tune, and evaluate models, and make research work in practice.

• Engineering Strength: You implement your own ideas and run them at scale.

• Range & Judgment: You drive strategy broadly or go deep on one hard problem as needed.

• Collaboration: You work well across teams and care about the outcome, not just your slice.

Even Better With

• Publications in top ML venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL).
• RL, preference optimization, or reward modeling at scale.
• Research from prototype to production in a fast-moving company.
• Enterprise products built for reliability, scale, and trust.

Benefits & Perks

• Full Health, Dental, & Vision Coverage
• Meaningful Equity Ownership
• In-Office Meals
• Haircuts at the Office
• Company Sponsored Conferences & Events
• 401(k), HSA, and FSA Plans
• Flexible PTO