Member of Technical Staff (Secure Intelligence Institute)

Responsibilities

• Develop threat models for emerging attack surfaces in AI-native products, including browser, search, and autonomous agents.
• Identify and analyze security and privacy threats across AI systems, infrastructure, and user-facing products.
• Develop novel defenses, mitigations, and detection mechanisms for security and privacy in AI-native products.
• Build security evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and datasets to measure the effectiveness of different defense mechanisms.
• Partner with Perplexity’s Security Engineering team to translate state of the art research into shipped security features and hardened system architectures.
• Collaborate with top-tier academic and industry researchers in SII's external research network.

Qualifications

• Hold a PhD (or equivalent research experience) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, with a primary focus on security and/or privacy.
• Experience publishing at top security conferences (IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, NDSS) demonstrating original, impactful research contributions.
• Deep expertise in one or more of: security of agentic systems, systems security, web and applications security, program analysis, and software security.
• Proficiency in Python (bonus points for TypeScript, Go, and/or Rust).
• Ability to operate with high independence, willing to dive in and take ownership, and comfortable in a fast-paced environment where research directly informs product.
• Clear and concise communication, translating complex attack narratives into actionable insights for engineering and leadership.