- Job title
- AI Researcher
- Job location
- Los Angeles, CA, US / Remote (US)
- Job description
- ### **About Us:**
MindFort is an **AI-powered penetration testing platform** that delivers human-level security testing at machine speed. We're building fully autonomous AI agents that can find, exploit, and patch complex vulnerabilities in web applications at massive scale.
Our agents think and act like human penetration testers: they analyze targets, collaborate, and exploit weaknesses — but with the speed and scale only AI can achieve.
Security teams are already falling behind with outdated tools and manual processes. AI-generated code is flooding the world faster than humans can secure it. MindFort is closing that gap. Our platform will be **critical for organizations building with AI** and will **redefine how offensive security is done**.
**About the Role:**
We're hiring an **AI Researcher** to push the frontier of what autonomous security agents can do. You'll own the core research that makes our agents smarter, more reliable, and capable of exploiting vulnerabilities that today's tools can't touch.
This is a **high-impact, high-ownership** role: as one of our earliest researchers, you'll set the direction for how we approach agent reasoning, planning, and evaluation — and your work will ship directly into a product that real security teams depend on. We move fast, the loop between research and production is tight, and you'll see your ideas hit real targets within days, not quarters.
**Key Responsibilities:**
* Research and develop novel methods to improve agent reasoning, planning, and multi-step exploitation capabilities.
* Design and run experiments on LLM-based agents — prompting strategies, memory, tool use, fine-tuning, and RL.
* Build rigorous evaluation harnesses and benchmarks to measure agent performance on real-world vulnerability discovery and exploitation.
* Translate research findings into production agent improvements, working closely with engineering.
* Stay on top of the latest in LLMs, agents, and offensive security, and bring the best ideas in-house.
* Contribute to the research community where it makes sense — publications, write-ups, and thought leadership.
**Qualifications**::
* Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science (or equivalent experience).
* Strong track record in ML/AI research — publications, open-source work, or comparable demonstrable impact.
* Deep hands-on experience with LLMs and agentic systems (prompting, tool use, fine-tuning, RL, or eval design).
* Strong Python skills and the ability to turn research prototypes into something that runs in production.
* Solid experimental rigor — you know how to design experiments, measure what matters, and avoid fooling yourself.
* Strong communication skills and proven ability to thrive in small, cross-functional teams.
**Nice to have:**
* Publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, etc.).
* Background in cybersecurity, web vulnerabilities, offensive security, or red-teaming.
* Experience training and serving LLMs at scale.
* Prior startup or early-stage experience.
**What You Get:**
* Competitive salary & equity.
* Top-tier health insurance — 100% covered.
* Lunch included regularly plus ad hoc team dinners.
* Unparalleled access to leading AI labs and world-class security teams.
* Unlimited, flexible PTO.
