Senior Research Staff, Adversarial Intelligence (AI)

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

Base salary: $174,191–$249,230 annually, depending on location, qualifications, experience, and skills. Full-time roles are eligible for equity in the form of stock options.

Company

hirify.global is a remote cybersecurity company developing NodeZero, a platform for production-safe autonomous penetration testing and security assessment operations.

What you will do

• Identify and lead research problems at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and computer systems.
• Translate product and security-environment challenges into research questions, technical hypotheses, and experimental plans.
• Design rigorous experiments, evaluation methodologies, prototypes, and technical systems for realistic security environments.
• Study AI techniques including large language models, agentic systems, reasoning, learning, planning, and search.
• Reason over attack paths, telemetry, graphs, configurations, identities, networks, cloud environments, and other heterogeneous security data.
• Collaborate with attack engineers, security engineers, product teams, and technical groups; mentor junior researchers and communicate findings through reports, presentations, prototypes, and relevant publications.

Requirements

• Strong computer science foundations and significant technical depth in systems security, machine learning, super intelligence, or a closely related area.
• Demonstrated ability to independently identify, structure, and solve complex technical problems and conduct research where the answer was not known in advance.
• Strong programming and software engineering skills, including translating research ideas into working systems and prototypes.
• Ability to design rigorous experiments and evaluation methodologies, critically analyze results, and assess assumptions, failure modes, limitations, and evidence.
• Ability to evaluate technical literature and quickly develop expertise in unfamiliar research areas.
• Ability to work across research questions, experiments, prototypes, and real systems while collaborating with researchers, engineers, product teams, and other stakeholders.
• Strong technical judgment, written and verbal communication skills, and ability to mentor junior researchers without formal people-management responsibility.
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent technical experience.

Nice to have

• Deep experience in systems security, offensive or defensive security, penetration testing, vulnerability research, operating systems, networks, distributed systems, cloud security, identity systems, or related fields.
• Deep experience with machine learning, deep learning, large language models, AI agents, reinforcement learning, planning, search, graph reasoning, program analysis, or related methods.
• Experience leading research from problem formulation through implementation, evaluation, and communication of results.
• Experience defining research directions, building systems for realistic environments or production-adjacent infrastructure, and designing experimental infrastructure, benchmarks, or evaluation frameworks.
• Familiarity with attack paths, Active Directory, cloud environments, identity systems, security controls, adversarial techniques, and autonomous security systems.
• Experience mentoring junior researchers, engineers, students, or interns and transferring research ideas into production systems.
• Publications, patents, conference presentations, open-source contributions, or comparable evidence of high-quality technical impact.

Culture & Benefits

• Fully remote work with a collaborative, respectful, ownership-oriented, and results-focused culture.
• Inclusive environment with diversity, equity, and inclusion as core principles.
• Health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and families.
• Flexible vacation policy and generous parental leave.
• Career development opportunities and a culture that encourages creativity and technical innovation.
• Hybrid and remote models exist across the company, including a Chicago office where some other roles require regular in-office presence.

Hiring process

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