Principal Security Researcher - EDR (Windows)

Reports to: Senior Director, Product Research 

Location: Remote, US

Compensation Range: $200,000 to $230,000 base plus bonus and equity

What We Do:

Cybercrime is growing, and more businesses are getting hit by threats that used to target only the biggest organizations. That pushes defenders like us to operate at the highest level, and it deepens our need for good people who want to make a meaningful impact.

Founded in 2015 by former NSA cyber operators, Huntress is a remote-first team working to make enterprise-grade cybersecurity accessible to businesses of all sizes. We work closely with security teams and service providers protecting complex environments, often without the time or headcount to handle it all. That’s why we build our technology in-house and back it with a 24/7 human-led Security Operations Center (SOC). As a result, our platform is never disconnected from the experts who manage it, ensuring our customers' protection.

Huntress now secures more than 5M endpoints and 14M identities worldwide. Those numbers keep growing because more businesses rely on us to help carry the load and operate with more confidence. Every day, you can see that commitment in how we stand with our customers and how we show up for each other.

What You’ll Do: 

The Huntress Product Research team has the unique honor of waking up every morning knowing we’re going to make hackers regret targeting our partners and customers. As a Principal Product Researcher, we’re looking for someone who wants to pour all of their creativity into building and implementing simple solutions that are disproportionately effective at countering these constantly evolving threats. Competitive candidates have experience managing, deploying, and securing SMB environments utilizing a wide variety of security software, best practices, and automation tools. Familiarity with product management, incident response, social engineering, psychology, education, and managed service provider tools is an additional way to differentiate yourself.

As you can imagine, success doesn’t happen in a vacuum. An effective Product Researcher fosters highly collaborative environments between the Product, Engineering, and Security teams to accelerate our mission and secure the 99% of businesses that fall below the enterprise poverty line. This collaboration is needed to produce and prioritize a unified technical vision that ultimately delivers our most impactful features and capabilities.

We defend over 5M endpoints for 225,000+ mid-sized and small-business customers, and that number continues to grow each month. Given this market’s tighter budget, it’s not financially feasible to assign human analysts to each client. The Security Operations team addresses this challenge head-on by building and scaling highly automated efficiencies-often lightly augmented by our SOC - that make intruders earn every inch of their access while maintaining affordability and healthy gross margins.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Identify innovative ways to detect Windows OS threats
• Develop cross-platform features that leverage telemetry from common OS subsystems such as file system, memory, process, and network activity
• Research and development of sensor capabilities to provide visibility and detection support for attack techniques across supported Windows OS versions
• Work collaboratively with internal engineering and detection teams to implement detection logic
• Identify and evaluate new telemetry opportunities
• Identify and address gaps in product coverage
• Respond to product escalations
• Perform False Positive and False Negative investigations
• Lead product research initiatives to develop and evaluate security product strategies and technologies
• Coordinate with Product and Engineering teams to integrate and operationalize solutions developed by Threat Operations teams
• Applies AI as a practical part of day-to-day product research work to improve the speed, quality, and impact of research outputs
• Uses AI to support information gathering, analysis, prototyping, and production of clear, decision-useful work products while maintaining accountability for the final output
• Builds and reuses lightweight prompts, templates, or workflows for recurring research tasks rather than relying on one-off use
• Develop internal and external technical documentation to educate customers and communicate research findings to adjacent teams about security risks and opportunities
• Mentor and teach technical expertise to advance the broader community
• Promote Huntress’ reputation through media interaction, public speaking, CFPs, CTFs, and blogs

Qualifications:

• Expert in Windows OS internals, components, APIs, and design
• Prior experience with Windows OS kernel coding and device drivers
• Experience testing EDRs, bypasses, and evasion techniques
• Comfortable with reverse engineering and using debuggers
• Proficiency in multiple programming/scripting languages, such as C/C++/C#, PowerShell, and Python
• Applies AI to improve research quality, speed, and outputs in day-to-day work
• Commitment to clear documentation of research findings
• Experience with MITRE ATT&CK matrix, SIGMA, Yara, and Elasticsearch/Kibana

What We Offer: 

• 100% remote work environment - since our founding in 2015
• Generous paid time off policy, including vacation, sick time, and paid holidays
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Highly competitive and comprehensive medical, dental, and vision benefits plans 
• 401(k) with a 5% contribution regardless of employee contribution
• Life and Disability insurance plans
• Stock options for all full-time employees 
• One-time $500 reimbursement for building/upgrading home office
• Annual allowance for education and professional development assistance 
• $75 USD/month digital reimbursement
• Access to the BetterUp platform for coaching, personal, and professional growth

Huntress is committed to creating a culture of inclusivity where every single member of our team is valued, has a voice, and is empowered to come to work every day just as they are. 

We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status, or any other legally protected status.  

We do discriminate against hackers who try to exploit businesses of all sizes.

Accommodations: 

If you require reasonable accommodation to complete this application, interview, or pre-employment testing or participate in the employee selection process, please direct your inquiries to [email protected]. Please note that non-accommodation requests to this inbox will not receive a response. 

Huntress uses artificial intelligence tools to assist in reviewing and evaluating job applications, including resume screening, skills assessment, and candidate matching and comparisons. These AI tools support our human recruiters in the initial review process, but do not make final hiring decisions without human involvement. By submitting your application, you acknowledge this use of AI in our recruitment process. Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice for more details on our practices and your data privacy rights.

#BI-Remote