Applied AI Scientist, Autonomous Defense

Horizon3.ai
United States
Workplace: RemoteFull timeUSD 313,000 - 369,000 annuallyFunction: Research & Scientific (R&D)Experience: 4+ yearsEducation: mastersSkills: ["Communication","Collaboration","Ownership"]

Build autonomous defensive agents that reason from proven attack paths to the exact control changes that stop real-world exploitation. Convert pentest results into evaluation data, run counterfactual experiments, and design reasoning across heterogeneous security control planes. Own safety mechanisms for autonomous production changes—dry-runs, blast-radius classification, approval gates, rollback, and audit trails—while partnering with attack and detection engineers.

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FursaFursa
Horizon3.ai
Horizon3.ai
2 days ago

Applied AI Scientist, Autonomous Defense

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 17 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Build autonomous defensive agents that reason from proven attack paths to the exact control changes that stop real-world exploitation. Convert pentest results into evaluation data, run counterfactual experiments, and design reasoning across heterogeneous security control planes. Own safety mechanisms for autonomous production changes—dry-runs, blast-radius classification, approval gates, rollback, and audit trails—while partnering with attack and detection engineers.
Location: United States
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Research & Scientific (R&D)
Seniority: Mid level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Build reasoning systems that map proven attack paths and exploitation telemetry to specific, applicable control changes ranked by effectiveness and operational blast radius.
  • •Turn pentest data into training and evaluation data, extracting why attacks succeed in one environment and fail in another.
  • •Design and run counterfactual experiments to estimate whether proposed changes break attack chains, their operational cost, and whether results generalize beyond the learned tenant.
  • •Design reasoning across heterogeneous control planes so an agent can operate across vendor APIs and policy models without a hardcoded playbook per product.
  • •Create autonomous-change safety architecture (dry-run/simulation, blast-radius classification, approval gates, staged rollout, rollback, audit trails) and collaborate to diagnose failure modes.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 313,000 - 369,000 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:Health InsuranceVisionDentalParental Leave

Key Requirements

  • •Strong ML engineering experience building, evaluating, and deploying production AI systems using deep learning, transformer models, and PyTorch.
  • •Hands-on experience with post-training for large language models (e.g., supervised fine-tuning, distillation, preference optimization, RL) or agentic systems with tool use and long-horizon execution.
  • •Track record of building evaluation systems for open-ended tasks where success is judged by outcome rather than clean labels.
  • •Experience reasoning over structured, heterogeneous real-world data (configurations, graphs, logs, policy documents) rather than benchmark-only datasets.
  • •Master’s in Computer Science/ML or related field (or equivalent practical experience) plus 4+ years of professional engineering experience; also demonstrate production-quality Python software fundamentals.
Experience:4+ years
Education:Master's in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field
Skills:CommunicationCollaborationOwnership
Tech Stack:PythonPyTorchDeep learningTransformer modelsAWSLLMsSupervised fine-tuningDistillationPreference optimizationReinforcement learningTool usePlanningNeo4jCrowdStrikeSentinelOneMicrosoft DefenderPalo AltoFortinetEntra IDOkta

Company Brief

Horizon3.ai
Builds NodeZero®, an autonomous penetration-testing platform that continuously finds, prioritizes, and verifies exploitable vulnerabilities across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments to help organizations reduce security risk.
Industry: Cybersecurity
Company Size: Large (251 to 1,000 employees)
Growth: Scaleup
Funding: Series D
Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
Founded: 2019
Glassdoor
Glassdoor: 4.9
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