Staff Security Researcher

Invicti Security•Austin, TX

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Invicti Security is seeking a hands-on offensive security researcher to join their team. This role involves transforming vulnerability and malware knowledge into detection content. The ideal candidate will take ownership of security checks, write accurate detection rules with low false-positive rates, and apply established research principles. The position requires a proactive approach to ensuring security checks deliver solid results for customers.

Requirements

8+ years of offensive security or application security research experience (Bachelor's + 5 years, or Master's + 3 years).
Broad knowledge of programming languages — JavaScript is a must, Python is a huge plus.
Strong understanding of security principles, standards, and best practices.
Deep understanding of vulnerability classifications, exploitation methodologies, and secure software development practices.
Complete knowledge and full understanding of detection writing for DAST scanners, fuzzers, or comparable systems — including detection logic, response interpretation, and false-positive management.
Experience designing testing frameworks, evaluation harnesses, or large-scale validation systems for security tooling.
Deep web application pentesting experience covering the OWASP Top 10 and adjacent classes — authentication, authorization, business logic, modern API surfaces (REST, GraphQL).
Comfortable researching and tackling hard problems and algorithms (e.g., parsing with ASTs).
Fluency with offensive tooling (Burp Suite, sqlmap, nmap, ffuf, custom payload generation) and the underlying HTTP/web protocol fundamentals.
Experience with cloud platforms, Kubernetes, containers, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD security is highly desirable.
Practical experience researching or securing LLM-powered applications, AI agents, or AI-assisted development workflows, including prompt injection, model abuse, tool invocation risks, MCP security, and emerging AI attack techniques.
Fluent in English, with strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to convey technical details to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Ability to collaborate effectively across multi-disciplinary teams and exercise judgment on when to escalate issues.
A hands-on attitude, intellectual curiosity and willingness to research across traditional application security, cloud-native security, and the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem, including LLM vulnerabilities, agent security, and MCP security.

Nice To Haves

OpenGrep (or Semgrep) experience.
Static analysis experience.
Experience building production-ready systems.
Public security research output (CVEs, advisories, talks, open-source tools).
YARA experience.

Responsibilities

Create new detection rules (primarily OpenGrep) to catch novel malware and vulnerability patterns and boost detection accuracy.
Extend support for new programming languages across our analysis pipeline.
Explore and experiment with cutting-edge tools and techniques to detect threats and malware at scale.
Research novel ways to exploit and analyze modern web applications and APIs — building proof-of-concept attacks and translating findings into shippable capabilities.
Research new vulnerability classes, exploitation techniques, cloud-native attack paths, and AI-specific attack vectors, and convert research into production-ready detections.
Direct the application of existing detection and exploitation principles while contributing to new policies, research standards, and attack methodologies.
Build attack chain templates that combine low-severity findings into high-impact exploitation paths.
Contribute to evaluation harnesses and benchmarks that measure detection effectiveness — false-positive rates, coverage, and accuracy.
Design and maintain evaluation harnesses, testing frameworks, and benchmarking systems that continuously measure detection accuracy, exploit reproducibility, false-positive rates, and coverage.
Contribute to internal research and help shape our public research agenda.
Write and publish blog posts on novel attacks and large-scale incidents, and represent Invicti in the security community through CVEs, tool releases, and conference contributions.
Stay current on industry trends in AppSec, AI red-teaming, offensive AI, LLM vulnerabilities, agent security, MCP security, and cloud-native attack techniques, and translate those insights into research priorities and product capabilities.
Triage packages from our analysis pipeline and validate findings.
Mentor junior and mid-level researchers on detection writing and exploitation technique.
Collaborate across engineering, product, AI/ML, and infrastructure teams to ensure research output ships and stays operational.
Partner with platform and infrastructure teams to improve security automation across CI/CD pipelines and cloud-native environments.
Help maintain detection quality across the platform, including triaging difficult or ambiguous findings.

Benefits

Health Insurance: 100% of employee health care, vision and dental premium costs covered. For dependents, 75% of the health care and 50% vision/dental premium cost contributed.
Employee Assistance Program: Emotional Support Counseling services - 24/7 Life Coaching, Dependent Care, Elder Care, Financial & Legal Support, Wellness Coaching, New Parent Support.
Parental Leave: 16 weeks paid leave for birthing parent recovery. 4 weeks paid leave for non-birthing/bonding parent.
401(k) Savings Plan: 50% up to 6% company match with 100% annual cliff vesting.
Hybrid work schedule: Twice a week from our Austin office.
Discretionary Time Off: Flexible vacation schedule.
Quarterly Thrive-Wellness Days: One extra vacation day per quarter.
Volunteerism Time Off: 5 days of paid time off each year for volunteer activities.
Paid Birthday Off: Take your birthday off.
Employee Recognition: Ongoing recognition & rewards.
A Culture that emphasizes personal and professional growth.