Thesis: Hack Yourself First: Autonomous LLM Agents for Continuous Penetration Testing (Cybersecurity)

Location: Onsite at the office in Sundsvall, Sweden. Start date: January or March 2027.

Company

hirify.global is a strategic partner in product and digital service development, combining cross-functional expertise to deliver solutions from idea to completion.

What you will do

• Evaluate an LLM agent that performs continuous penetration testing in a test environment with known vulnerabilities.
• Run the agent from a single jump host to perform reconnaissance, port scanning, vulnerability discovery, exploitation, and reporting.
• Compare generated reports with known vulnerabilities and measure findings, exploitation results, and execution time.
• Investigate report reliability, false positives, and the use of multi-agent orchestration for verification.
• Assess trust and safety risks, including whether cloned environments or sandboxing reduce the risk of damaging systems.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Graduation in June 2027.
• Fluency in Swedish, written and spoken.
• Fluency in English, written and spoken.
• Testing must be limited to authorised targets with a defined threat model.
• The work uses existing models; training new models is out of scope, and fine-tuning is considered only with a clear justification.
• The proof-of-concept agent only needs to identify known vulnerabilities and common weaknesses; zero-day research is out of scope.

Nice to have

• Interest in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence.
• Familiarity with MCP, Linux, Nmap, weak or default credentials, network segmentation, misconfigurations, or OWASP Top 10 web vulnerabilities.

Culture & Benefits

• Thesis work with hands-on experience on real projects.
• Supportive and innovative working environment.
• Proof-of-concept research intended for experimentation and evaluation, with potential for later development into a business solution.
• Applications are accepted through the careers page only due to GDPR.

Hiring process

• Submit the application through the careers page as soon as possible and no later than 30 November 2026.
• Questions may be sent to johanna.edstrom@knightec.se.