Software Engineer - AI (Level determined by experience)
About the role
Synack’s Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) platform manages customers’ attack surfaces by discovering new assets, pentesting for critical vulnerabilities, and gaining visibility into the root causes of security risks. The company is committed to making the world more secure by harnessing a talented, vetted community of security researchers to deliver continuous penetration testing and vulnerability management, with actionable results. Synack's PTaaS platform has uncovered more than 71,000 exploitable vulnerabilities to date, protecting a growing list of Global 2000 customers and U.S. agencies in a FedRAMP Moderate Authorized environment.
You'll design and ship AI agents that plan, reason, drive security tooling and surface exploitable vulnerabilities, running autonomously inside sandboxed environments. It's a hands‑on senior role spanning applied AI and cybersecurity. You'll own systems end to end and raise the technical bar for the team around you. This is a remote position based in the U.S.; only U.S. citizens can be hired due to federal government contract requirements.
Responsibilities
- Build AI agents that automate penetration testing: planning, tool use, reasoning over findings, and acting safely within scope.
- Stand up and run the sandboxed cyber‑lab and range infrastructure, containerised on Kubernetes, where these agents execute offensive tooling.
- Ship features from ideation through production, including evals, guardrails and monitoring.
- Improve how our agents work: prompting, tool orchestration, evaluation, and cost.
- Lead code reviews and design sessions, and help the engineers around you grow.
- Work closely with our security researchers to translate how they hack into how our agents operate.
Requirements
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering.
- Proven ability to build and scale production systems.
- Strong Python, polyglot codebase; fluent or willing to learn Go.
- Experience building LLMs and agentic frameworks leveraging tools like RAG, MCP — from dev environment to production.
- Ability to create reliable agents (prompting, evaluation, guardrails, understanding of token and cost optimization).
- Capable of leveraging Docker, Kubernetes, isolated sandbox, cloud experience (GCP preferred).
- Disciplined testing approach to microservices, gRPC, API design, async messaging (Pub/Sub, Kafka).
- Passionate desire to understand how systems get compromised.
- Clear communication and collaborative ability to partner across teams.
Skills
- Experience in a fast‑paced startup environment.
- Experience in cyber security.
Benefits
Synack offers a comprehensive benefits package; details are available in the benefits overview. The compensation package may also include equity.
Pay
The target salary range for this position is $145,000 – $250,000, based on location, level, relevant experience, and skills.