Research Engineer

Society of Defense Financial Management; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Significant equity

Job summary

Society of Defense Financial Management is seeking a Founding Research Engineer in San Francisco to build and guide AI-driven defense applications. You will tackle elite quantitative challenges, work with petabyte-scale multimodal data, and help shape the core learning stack.

This early engineering hire will influence both technology and deployment strategy. Ideal candidates are highly quantitative, empirically minded, and comfortable with ambiguous research problems in a small, mission-driven

Qualifications

• Strong quantitative background with empirical mindset.
• Experience modeling time-series data and sequential processes.
• Familiar with ML, deep learning, and transformers.
• Willingness to work on ambiguous research problems.

Responsibilities

• Join a small, high-agency team working on defense-relevant research.
• Help build the full prediction and learning stack for multimodal data.
• Shape the technical direction of the company as an early engineer.
• Collaborate across data capture, representation, and modeling.

Skills

Quantitative research

Applied mathematics

Statistics

Machine learning

Time-series analysis

Deep learning

Transformers

Data representation

Education

Applied mathematics or statistics

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 with petabyte-scale, multimodal time-series data refreshing 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 is not 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.