Remote AI Engineer for Autonomous Defense & Secure Automation

NightDragon Acquisition Corp.; United States; On-site; USD 313,000 - 369,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Inclusive Team

Growth Opportunities

Innovative Culture

Hybrid & Remote Work

Competitive Compensation

Job summary

Horizon3 in the United States is seeking an AI Researcher to build autonomous agents that translate offense knowledge into defensive actions within customer environments.

You will design reasoning systems, evaluate with real attack data, and collaborate across security engineers, product, and infra. This role combines deep learning, open-ended evaluation, and safety in production, with a strong emphasis on responsible, auditable changes.

Qualifications

• Strong ML engineering experience building, evaluating, and deploying production AI systems.
• Hands-on experience with post-training large language models or agentic systems with tool use, planning, and long-horizon execution.
• Track record building evaluation systems for open-ended tasks where there is no clean label.
• Experience reasoning over structured, heterogeneous, messy real-world data.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production-grade Python.
• Experience with data pipelines, distributed systems, and AWS.
• Ability to work across model behavior, APIs, and infrastructure.
• Able to independently research unfamiliar systems and become the team expert.
• Strong written and verbal communication, including technical documentation.
• Master's in CS or related field or equivalent practical experience plus 4+ years of engineering experience.

Responsibilities

• Build the reasoning systems that map proven attack paths to specific control changes, ranked by effectiveness.
• Turn pentest data into training and evaluation data.
• Design and run counterfactual experiments in representative test environments: would this change break the attack chain, operational cost, generalization.
• Design the reasoning layer over heterogeneous control planes for cross-vendor APIs.
• Design the safety architecture for autonomous change with dry-runs, blast-radius, approvals, rollouts, and audit trails.
• Collaborate with attack, detection, product, and infrastructure teams to define behavior and diagnose failures.
• Own problems end to end in a 0→1 environment where outputs land in production security posture.

Skills

ML engineering

Deep learning

Transformer models

PyTorch

Post-training LLMs / agentic systems

Evaluation systems

Structured data reasoning

Python production code

Data pipelines

AWS

Cross-functional collaboration

Independent research

Strong communication

Masters + experience

Education

Master's in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Neo4j

AWS CLI

Job description

Horizon3 in the United States is seeking an AI Researcher to build autonomous agents that translate offense knowledge into defensive actions within customer environments.

You will design reasoning systems, evaluate with real attack data, and collaborate across security engineers, product, and infra. This role combines deep learning, open-ended evaluation, and safety in production, with a strong emphasis on responsible, auditable changes.