Research Engineer

Acceler8 Talent; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 260,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Acceler8 Talent in San Francisco (onsite) seeks a Founding Research Engineer - AI & Defence to join a high-ambition startup building novel AI-powered defense technology. You’ll work with petabyte-scale, multimodal time-series data and help craft the full prediction and learning stack.

You may be a Quantitative Researcher or Developer in top systematic environments; backgrounds include math, statistics, signal processing, ML, and intelligence tech. No cybersecurity experience required.

Qualifications

• The strongest candidates will be highly quantitative, empirically minded and comfortable working on ambiguous research problems.
• Prior cybersecurity experience is not required.
• The company is revenue-generating with runway and seeded by notable investors.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Quantitative

Empirical thinking

Machine learning

Sequential modelling

Statistics

Signal processing

Education

Applied mathematics or statistics

Intelligence or national-security technology

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.