{"id":115174,"url":"https://alion.io/job/depthfirst-research-engineer","title":"Research Engineer","company":{"id":42780,"name":"Depthfirst","domain":"depthfirst.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/depthfirst","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":68,"open_postings":19,"ghost_share":0.526,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":161000,"max_usd":302000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":451},"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-09-14T16:47:01Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-09-14","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T23:33:28Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":397,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":396},"description":"About depthfirst\nWe believe that software is the foundation of modern civilization - yet vulnerabilities threaten its integrity, security, and resilience. We are on a mission to solve security.\ndepthfirst is building intelligence to detect and remediate critical software vulnerabilities. We are training and scaling security AI agents to discover zero-days vulnerabilities across large customer codebases and popular open source software.\nOur founding team includes deep expertise in data, infrastructure, security and LLMs with technical leaders from DeepMind, Databricks, Square, and Faire. We are looking for strong technical people who are interested in working at the intersection of AI, Security, and Infrastructure.\nAbout this role\nWe’re seeking an experienced Research Engineer to join our effort in building and training AI agents for vulnerability discovery and exploitation.\nWe are building a technology capable of finding the next Log4J at scale, finding and remediating vulnerabilities in customer and open source codebases.\nWe are looking for strong engineers with strong intuition, experience in model evaluation, and benchmarks. Reinforcement Learning experience is a plus. Your work will play a crucial role in building a product that aims to redefine how companies do security.\nYou’re excited about this role because you will…\nBuild State-of-the-Art AI Agentic pipelines optimized for discovering intricate software vulnerabilities and generate exploits\n\nDesign, Maintain and Evolve evaluation benchmarks for AI agents that reflects the problems our users face\n\nDesign & Develop training procedures and reinforcement learning environments to train security coding agents\n\nWork on a Product that Solves a Critical Problem - and we already have a handful of customers who have found it valuable in fixing some eye-opening vulnerabilities within the first few days of using our product.\n\nQualifications\n3+ years of full-time experience in AI research engineering in machine learning, deep learning, and/or natural language processing\n\nExperience with developing machine learning models at scale from inception to business impact\n\nProgramming experience in Python and hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch\n\nA bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent industry experience\n\nA love for technology, and an insatiable curiosity for new tools to tackle real problems\n\nCapable of solving complex problems with simple solutions. Building reliable and scalable products, making right trade-offs along the way\n\nA tendency to leave things in a better way than you found it\n\nWhat We Offer\nCompetitive salary with meaningful equity\n\nHealth, Vision, and Dental Insurance\n\nOffice lunch and dinner (when working from our San Francisco office)\n\ndepthfirst is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.\nTo all recruitment agencies: depthfirst does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to depthfirst employees. depthfirst is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes and will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with the Company.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3407,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Dental insurance","Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Penetration Testing","Application Security","Cybersecurity AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2025-09-14T16:47:01Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":5,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.165,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":396,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:3","stale_co","velocity","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/depthfirst-research-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/depthfirst-research-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T00:54:03Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1193,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":42780},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=42780"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fdepthfirst-research-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fdepthfirst-research-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fdepthfirst-research-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/depthfirst-research-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fdepthfirst-research-engineer"}]}