Founding Research Engineer (AI & Defence)

Location: United States; remote work across Eastern and Central Time Zones in the US. Onsite options include San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco, San Mateo, Mountain View, Boulder, and Virginia.

Salary: $200,000–$300,000 per year, with some compensation listings including base salary and equity.

Company

Fast-growing defence AI startup developing systems for national-scale cybersecurity problems.

What you will do

• Build quantitative prediction and agent-learning systems for AI-powered cyber operations.
• Process PB-scale multimodal time-series data with refresh cycles under one second.
• Develop streaming and data-capture infrastructure.
• Create useful representations from noisy, unstructured signals.
• Model actor behaviour using statistical methods, deep learning, and transformers.
• Train agents against sparse, long-horizon rewards and take models from hypothesis through deployment.

Requirements

• Background as a quantitative researcher, developer, or applied machine learning engineer.
• Strong empirical judgement and hands-on coding ability.
• Experience with noisy time-series data, signal processing, or behavioural modelling.
• Experience owning models from hypothesis through deployment.
• Comfort with both statistical methods and deep learning.
• Ability to work effectively in ambiguous, high-agency environments.

Nice to have

• Cybersecurity experience is useful but not required.

Culture & Benefits

• Founding-level ownership across research and production.
• Opportunity to help shape the technical team as the company scales.
• Work alongside quantitative and cybersecurity specialists.
• Join a revenue-generating company backed by seed investors with significant runway.