Founding Member: Cybersecurity Research Engineer

AI Security Assurance is an early-stage, remote-first startup on a mission to accelerate the delivery of trustworthy systems — systems proven secure and safe by design. We build automated tooling for whole-system security and safety assurance: it analyzes a system as it's actually built — including the interactions between components, where the most damaging design-level flaws hide — and produces the evidence that trustworthy systems require. Our work is grounded in Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) and formal methods for security, following the NIST systems security engineering framework (SP 800-160). We're bootstrapped and pre-funding, building toward funded government R&D (DARPA, SBIR) and a commercial platform.

About the Opportunity

This is a founding-member role, not a salaried job today. We're looking for someone to help us build the company and win the funded research contracts that pay for the work. In place of a salary now, founding members share in the upside through equity / ownership participation; when we land a contract that funds the role, that contract compensates the work. We're honest about the risk — there is no guarantee of funding — and we're looking for people who want to build something real and share in its success.

Responsibilities

• Lead the research that grounds our tooling in real systems — reverse engineering and binary analysis, vulnerability research, and recovering a system's true design from source and binaries so it can be analyzed at the system level.
• Connect low-level findings back to design-level security analysis, and help shape the research behind our proposals.

Requirements

• Vulnerability research experience (discovering and analyzing real weaknesses)
• Reverse engineering and binary analysis
• Strong low-level skills — e.g., C/assembly, debuggers, disassemblers (Ghidra/IDA/Binary Ninja), and software/firmware internals
• Static and/or dynamic analysis of binaries and source
• Ability to work independently and wear multiple hats in an early-stage team
• Ability to work in the U.S. without sponsorship; willingness/ability to obtain a U.S. security clearance for future government work

Nice-to-haves

• AI / LLM familiarity and modern development tools (helpful, not the core job)
• Fuzzing, exploit development, or program-analysis tooling
• STPA-Sec or threat-modeling exposure; mapping vulnerabilities to design weaknesses
• Research, publications, CTF results, or published CVEs

This is a founding-member position, not a paid role at this time. Paid compensation begins when a contract funds the role. There is no guarantee of funding.