Research Staff, Adversarial Intelligence (AI Security)

Location: US, Remote; up to 5% travel may be required.

Base salary: $145,000–$170,000 annually, plus eligibility for equity in the form of stock options.

Company

hirify.global is a remote cybersecurity product company developing NodeZero, a platform for production-safe autonomous penetration testing and security assessment across internal, external, cloud, and hybrid cloud environments.

What you will do

• Conduct research at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and computer systems.
• Formulate research questions from technical challenges faced by Horizon3 and its customers.
• Design and run experiments in controlled and representative environments.
• Build research prototypes and implement methods for meaningful evaluation.
• Study AI techniques including large language models, agentic systems, reasoning methods, and learning algorithms.
• Analyze security systems, attack paths, telemetry, graphs, configurations, and real-world security data while collaborating with research, engineering, and product teams.

Requirements

• Strong computer science foundations covering algorithms, systems, software, and data.
• Technical depth in systems security, super intelligence, machine learning, or a closely related area, with interest in developing expertise across AI and security.
• Strong programming skills and ability to translate technical ideas into working implementations; Python is particularly useful, but no specific language is required.
• Ability to design careful experiments, analyze results, and distinguish evidence from intuition.
• Interest in both research and engineering, including moving between technical ideas, experiments, prototypes, and implementation.
• Ability to receive feedback, revise approaches, investigate unfamiliar technical areas, and learn from researchers and engineers.
• Good technical judgment and strong written and verbal communication skills.
• A degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent technical experience.
• The role may be hired at P1 (Entry) or P2 (Developing) based on experience and demonstrated technical maturity; junior researchers receive mentorship and technical guidance.

Nice to have

• Experience in systems, offensive, or defensive security; penetration testing; vulnerability research; operating systems; networks; distributed systems; cloud security; or related areas.
• Experience with machine learning, deep learning, large language models, AI agents, reinforcement learning, planning, search, graph-based reasoning, or related AI methods.
• Research experience through an academic group, thesis, independent project, internship, industrial research project, or comparable technical work.
• Experience designing experimental infrastructure, benchmarks, test environments, or evaluation frameworks.
• Experience building systems for real-world data, environments, or security infrastructure.
• Familiarity with attack paths, Active Directory, cloud environments, identity systems, network security controls, or adversarial techniques.
• Strong publications, conference presentations, open-source contributions, or other evidence of high-quality technical work; publications are valuable but not required.
• Experience working across research and engineering teams or contributing research ideas to practical systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work with a collaborative, respectful, inclusive, and ownership-oriented culture; some roles may use the Chicago office for regular in-office work.
• Health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and families.
• Flexible vacation policy and generous parental leave.
• Career development opportunities in a growing company.
• Full-time roles are eligible for equity through stock options.

Hiring process

• Application materials may redact age-identifying information, including age, date of birth, and dates of school attendance or graduation, without penalty.