hirly

Depthfirst

Research Engineer

San Francisco

Apply through hirly

hirly scores this role against your resume, shows its reasoning, then writes a resume and cover letter for it and fills the application with you. Free to start — no card required.

hirly's read of this role

Seniority
Mid level
Country
US
Work mode
On-site / unstated
First seen by hirly
10 Sept 2026

Derived automatically from the posting. Sign up to see how the role scores against your own resume.

the posting

About depthfirst

We 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.

depthfirst 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.

Our 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.

About this role

We’re seeking an experienced Research Engineer to join our effort in building and training AI agents for vulnerability discovery and exploitation.

We are building a technology capable of finding the next Log4J at scale, finding and remediating vulnerabilities in customer and open source codebases.

We 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.

You’re excited about this role because you will…

Build State-of-the-Art AI Agentic pipelines optimized for discovering intricate software vulnerabilities and generate exploits

Design, Maintain and Evolve evaluation benchmarks for AI agents that reflects the problems our users face

Design & Develop training procedures and reinforcement learning environments to train security coding agents

Work 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.

Qualifications

3+ years of full-time experience in AI research engineering in machine learning, deep learning, and/or natural language processing

Experience with developing machine learning models at scale from inception to business impact

Programming experience in Python and hands-on experience with frameworks such as PyTorch

A bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering or equivalent industry experience

A love for technology, and an insatiable curiosity for new tools to tackle real problems

Capable of solving complex problems with simple solutions. Building reliable and scalable products, making right trade-offs along the way

A tendency to leave things in a better way than you found it

What We Offer

Competitive salary with meaningful equity

Health, Vision, and Dental Insurance

Office lunch and dinner (when working from our San Francisco office)

depthfirst 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.

To 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.

Browse similar roles

Is this role actually a fit for you?

hirly answers with a score and its reasoning, then writes the resume and cover letter if you decide to go for it.

Score it against my resume
Research Engineer at Depthfirst — hirly