Security Researcher

Pi Security • San Francisco, CA

6d • Onsite

About The Position

We are a well-funded security startup in San Francisco, founded by the teams who led Microsoft's vulnerability mitigation efforts and Tesla's offensive research. We're building a platform that changes how companies handle security vulnerabilities — not by finding more of them, but by understanding them deeply enough to fix them at the root and keep whole classes from coming back. The hard problems behind that — what to detect, how to prove a finding is real, how to remediate the way a senior engineer would — are research problems. That's where you come in.

Requirements

• 8+ years in security research, vulnerability analysis, or applied security engineering.
• Startup DNA: You've worked in an early-stage or 0→1 environment — comfortable with ambiguity, shipping without a big org behind you, and changing direction when the data says so.
• Research-to-product track record: You've turned research into things that shipped — features, tools, detections in production — not just papers or reports.
• Deep expertise in modern application stacks (microservices, containers, cloud platforms).
• Strong programming ability in at least one modern language (Python, Go, TypeScript, etc.).
• Experience designing experiments, building datasets or benchmarks, and measuring quality quantitatively.
• Hands-on experience applying LLMs to real problems — evaluation, prompting, fine-tuning, or agentic systems — or a demonstrated ability to get there fast.
• A history of discovering serious vulnerabilities (CVEs welcome) and responsible disclosure.
• You can explain a complex attack and its real impact clearly to engineers, executives, and customers.
• Permanent authorization to work in the US (for the San Francisco role) or in Israel (for the Israel role).

Nice To Haves

• Research that went public and mattered — publications, disclosures, or talks that changed how people think about a problem, not just filled a slot at a conference.
• A product you built at a startup — something that shipped, that real users depended on, where you can point at your fingerprints.
• Innovation around AI and workflows — novel ways of putting LLMs or agents to work inside real engineering or security workflows, beyond demos and prompt wrappers.
• A healthy disrespect for "that's how we've always done it" — and a track record of actually building the better way.

Responsibilities

• Identify where novel approaches can meaningfully beat the state of the art in vulnerability detection, triage, and remediation — and decide what we pursue and what we kill.
• Build proofs of concept for new detection and remediation techniques, validate them against real-world code and data, and carry the winners through to production with engineering.
• Design the datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation pipelines that measure precision, coverage, and false-positive rates.
• Deep research into modern attack vectors across cloud (AWS/GCP), containers, microservices, APIs, AI-generated code, and LLM applications — not just how vulnerabilities are found, but how they're born, how they're fixed, and how a whole class gets eliminated.
• Manage the internal corpus of vulnerabilities, exploit patterns, and remediation strategies the platform learns from.
• Contribute to what we publish, where we speak, and the credibility the company earns in the security community.

Benefits

• Funding is in place
• The problems are real: vulnerability management is broken in ways everyone in the industry can see and almost no one is positioned to fix.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed