Senior Offensive Security Engineer, Vulnerability Operations

Socket.dev; North Carolina; Hybrid; USD 224,000 - 431,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA is seeking an experienced security engineer to craft autonomous red team agents that perform reconnaissance, exploitation, and evidence capture against targets. You will extend multi-phase agent harnesses across runtimes and model providers, encoding operator tradecraft into prompts and tools for robust offensive capabilities.

You will build verification and safety layers, mentor engineers, and evaluate frontier models for offensive tasks, turning engagements into repeatable agent

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years in security engineering, with at least 4 years in offensive security.
• Deep, hands-on exploitation skill in web apps, cloud/Kubernetes, or systems.
• Strong software engineering ability in Python; production code.
• Practical experience building with LLMs: agent frameworks, tool use, multi-agent orchestration.
• Sound judgment about autonomous offensive tooling — scoping, authorization, blast-radius.

Responsibilities

• Crafting and building new red team agents: autonomous and semi-autonomous LLM agents that perform reconnaissance, hypothesis-driven exploitation, and evidence capture against NVIDIA-owned targets
• Extending our existing agent harnesses across multiple agent runtimes and model providers
• Encoding real operator tradecraft into prompts, tools, and playbooks — web app exploitation, auth bypass, SSRF/deserialization chains, cloud and Kubernetes attack paths
• Building the verification layer: exploit-confirmation harnesses that prove findings are real before a human ever sees them
• Engineering the safety side of autonomy: sandboxing, scope enforcement, tool allowlists/blocklists, credential isolation, and prompt-injection defenses
• Evaluating and benchmarking frontier models for offensive tasks; partnering with our human red team to turn their engagements into repeatable agent capabilities
• Mentoring engineers on the team and setting the technical bar for agentic offensive tooling

Skills

Security engineering

Offensive security

Penetration testing

Red teaming

Exploit development

Python

LLMs / agent frameworks

Multi-agent orchestration

Cloud/Kubernetes

Code review

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Claude Code

Codex CLI

Job description

What you'll be doing:

• Crafting and building new red team agents: autonomous and semi-autonomous LLM agents that perform reconnaissance, hypothesis-driven exploitation, and evidence capture against NVIDIA-owned targets

• Extending our existing agent harnesses (multi-phase orchestration, parallel specialist subagents, judge/verifier stages, out-of-band callback infrastructure) across multiple agent runtimes and model providers

• Encoding real operator tradecraft into prompts, tools, and playbooks — web app exploitation, auth bypass, SSRF/deserialization chains, cloud and Kubernetes attack paths — so agents find what a skilled human would

• Building the verification layer: exploit-confirmation harnesses that prove findings are real before a human ever sees them, driving false-positive rates down

• Engineering the safety side of autonomy: sandboxing, scope enforcement, tool allowlists/blocklists, credential isolation, and prompt-injection defenses for agents operating with offensive capability

• Evaluating and benchmarking frontier models for offensive tasks; partnering with our human red team to turn their engagements into repeatable agent capabilities

• Mentoring engineers on the team and setting the technical bar for agentic offensive tooling

What we need to see:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

• 12+ years in security engineering, with at least 4 years in offensive security: penetration testing, red teaming, exploit development, or vulnerability research

• Deep, hands-on exploitation skill in at least one domain (web application, cloud/Kubernetes, or systems/binary) — you can build and prove an exploit chain, not just run a scanner

• Strong software engineering ability in Python; you ship production code, not just PoCs

• Practical experience building with LLMs: agent frameworks, tool use/function calling, multi-agent orchestration, or coding agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI, or similar)

• Sound judgment about autonomous offensive tooling — scoping, authorization, and blast-radius thinking are second nature

• Respectful, responsible approach to offensive testing — we break things carefully and fix them fast

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

• Published security research, CVEs, conference talks, or notable CTF results

• Certifications like OSWE, OSEP, OSCP, or GXPN

• Experience with SAST/DAST internals, fuzzing, or program analysis

• Experience red-teaming AI systems themselves (prompt injection, jailbreaks, model evaluation) or contributing to AI-security research

• Familiarity with Kubernetes/OpenShift, GitOps, and operating worker fleets at scale

With competitive salaries and a generous benefits package, NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology world's most desirable employers. We have some of the most forward-thinking and talented people in the world working for us and, due to unprecedented growth, our elite engineering teams are rapidly growing. If you're a creative and autonomous engineer with a real passion for technology, we want to hear from you!

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD for Level 5, and 272,000 USD - 431,250 USD for Level 6.

You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until September 6, 2026.

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.

NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.