Founding Research Engineer (AI & Defence)

Location: San Francisco, onsite. Applicants must be US citizens or Green Card holders; no export controls are required.

Salary: Base salaries up to $300,000 per year plus significant equity.

Company

Early-stage defense AI startup building technology to detect and conduct a novel class of AI-powered cyber operations.

What you will do

• Stream and capture continuously refreshing petabyte-scale, multimodal time-series data.
• Transform noisy and ungrounded signals into useful representations.
• Model the future behavior of actors operating in 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 as an early engineering hire.

Requirements

• Highly quantitative and empirically minded approach to ambiguous research problems.
• Experience in quantitative research or quantitative development, particularly in systematic trading or market microstructure.
• Relevant expertise in applied mathematics, statistics, signal processing, machine learning, sequential modeling, computational social science, or intelligence and national-security technology.
• US citizenship or Green Card required.
• Prior cybersecurity experience is not required.

Nice to have

• Experience in a top systematic trading environment.
• Background in market microstructure, intelligence, or national-security technology.

Culture & Benefits

• Work onsite with a small, high-agency team.
• Founding engineering hires receive significant equity.
• Opportunity to influence core technology and its deployment in defense and intelligence contexts.
• The startup is revenue-generating and backed by leading seed investors.

Hiring process

• Contact Ethan at hirify.global to learn more and apply.