Research Engineer

Acceler8 Talent; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Significant equity

Job summary

Acceler8 Talent in San Francisco is seeking a Founding Research Engineer - AI & Defence to join a pioneering defense AI startup building scalable, multimodal time-series platforms and predictive models.

The role blends advanced machine learning, statistics, and real-time data engineering; you will shape technical direction as an early engineer, potentially coming from quantitative research or trading backgrounds, with equity as part of the package.

Qualifications

• Highly quantitative and empirically minded.
• Comfortable with ambiguous research problems.
• May come from Quantitative Researcher/Developer in top systematic trading environment.
• Backgrounds in systematic trading, applied mathematics, statistics, signal processing, ML, computational social science, intelligence or national-security technology.
• Prior cybersecurity experience is not required.

Responsibilities

• Shape the technical direction of the company as an early engineering hire.
• Work with petabyte-scale, multimodal time-series data and build the full prediction and learning stack.
• Develop data streaming, representation learning, and forecasting models.
• Combine classical statistics with deep learning and transformers.
• Build agents that learn from sparse, long-horizon signals.

Skills

Quantitative reasoning

Machine learning

Statistical analysis

Time-series data

Python

ML frameworks

Tools

Python

ML frameworks

Job description

Founding Research Engineer - AI & Defence

San Francisco | Onsite

I’m working with a highly ambitious defense AI startup building technology to detect and conduct a novel class of AI-powered cyber operation. This is not conventional cybersecurity, vulnerability research or zero-day hunting.

The technical challenge sits much closer to elite quantitative research, market microstructure and applied machine learning.

You’ll work withpetabyte-scale, multimodal time-series datarefreshing in under one second, helping build the full prediction and learning stack:

• Stream and capture continuously refreshing data at scale
• Convert noisy, often ungrounded signals into useful representations
• Model the future behaviour of actors within complex environments
• Combine classical statistical methods with deep learning and transformers
• Build agents that learn new strategies from sparse, long-horizon reward signals
• Shape the technical direction of the company as an early engineering hire

The strongest candidates will be highly quantitative, empirically minded and comfortable working on ambiguous research problems.You may currently be a Quantitative Researcher or Quantitative Developer within a top systematic trading environment.

Relevant backgrounds could also include:

• Systematic trading and market microstructure
• Applied mathematics or statistics
• Signal processing
• Machine learning and sequential modelling
• Computational social science
• Intelligence or national-security technology

Prior cybersecurity experience isnot required.

The company is already revenue-generating, has more than 18 months of runway and is backed by leading seed investors. The founding team has built and exited multiple companies, collectively returning more than $1B to investors.

Its advisory network includes senior military leaders and former White House advisors.

This is an opportunity to join a small, high-agency team working on problems with direct defense and intelligence relevance, where the earliest hires will influence both the core technology and how it is deployed.

Base salaries up to $300k + Significant equity for founding Engineers

No export controls, but you will need to either be a Green Card holder or US citizen to apply.