Research Engineer

depthfirst Inc.; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Vision insurance

Dental insurance

Office meals (SF)

Job summary

depthfirst is seeking an experienced Research Engineer to join our team in building and training AI agents for vulnerability discovery and remediation. We are crafting a scalable technology to find the next Log4J and to remediate issues across customer and open-source codebases.

You will contribute to model evaluation, benchmarks, and RL-based training, shaping a product already delivering value to customers within days of use. This role emphasizes practical impact in security and AI at scale.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of full-time experience in AI research engineering in machine learning, deep learning, and/or natural language processing
• Experience with developing machine learning models at scale from inception to business impact
• Programming experience in Python and hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch
• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent industry experience
• A love for technology, and an insatiable curiosity for new tools to tackle real problems
• Capable of solving complex problems with simple solutions. Building reliable and scalable products, making right trade-offs along the way
• A tendency to leave things in a better way than you found it

Responsibilities

• Build State-of-the-Art AI Agentic pipelines optimized for discovering intricate software vulnerabilities and generate exploits
• Design, Maintain and Evolve evaluation benchmarks for AI agents that reflects the problems our users face
• Design & Develop training procedures and reinforcement learning environments to train security coding agents
• Work on a Product that Solves a Critical Problem - and we already have a handful of customers who have found it valuable in fixing some eye-opening vulnerabilities within the first few days of using our product.

Skills

AI research

Python

PyTorch

Machine learning

NLP

Education

B.S. in CS/Software Eng

Job description

About depthfirst

We believe that software is the foundation of modern civilization - yet vulnerabilities threaten its integrity, security, and resilience. We are on a mission to solve security.

depthfirst is building intelligence to detect and remediate critical software vulnerabilities. We are training and scaling security AI agents to discover zero-days vulnerabilities across large customer codebases and popular open source software.

Our founding team includes deep expertise in data, infrastructure, security and LLMs with technical leaders from DeepMind, Databricks, Square, and Faire. We are looking for strong technical people who are interested in working at the intersection of AI, Security, and Infrastructure.

About this role

We’re seeking an experienced Research Engineer to join our effort in building and training AI agents for vulnerability discovery and exploitation.

We are building a technology capable of finding the next Log4J at scale, finding and remediating vulnerabilities in customer and open source codebases.

We are looking for strong engineers with strong intuition, experience in model evaluation, and benchmarks. Reinforcement Learning experience is a plus. Your work will play a crucial role in building a product that aims to redefine how companies do security.

You’re excited about this role because you will…

• Build State-of-the-Art AI Agentic pipelines optimized for discovering intricate software vulnerabilities and generate exploits

• Design, Maintain and Evolve evaluation benchmarks for AI agents that reflects the problems our users face

• Design & Develop training procedures and reinforcement learning environments to train security coding agents

• Work on a Product that Solves a Critical Problem - and we already have a handful of customers who have found it valuable in fixing some eye-opening vulnerabilities within the first few days of using our product.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of full-time experience in AI research engineering in machine learning, deep learning, and/or natural language processing

• Experience with developing machine learning models at scale from inception to business impact

• Programming experience in Python and hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent industry experience

• A love for technology, and an insatiable curiosity for new tools to tackle real problems

• Capable of solving complex problems with simple solutions. Building reliable and scalable products, making right trade-offs along the way

• A tendency to leave things in a better way than you found it

What We Offer

• Competitive salary with meaningful equity

• Health, Vision, and Dental Insurance

• Office lunch and dinner (when working from our San Francisco office)

depthfirst is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.