Research Engineer (AI Pentest)

We’re making security suck less for developers.

Security tools haven’t kept up with how software is built today. They interrupt teams, slow releases, and turn security into a bottleneck instead of a capability. We built Aikido to change that. Aikido builds developer-first security products that reduce real risk without getting in the way of shipping software. We focus on what actually matters and automate the rest.

We’re taking on legacy security tools teams have been stuck with, and we’re winning. If you want to help us take market share and build products developers actually enjoy using, you’re in the right place.

Founded in 2022 by third-time founders, Aikido has $85M in the bank and a long runway ahead. We’re building toward self-securing software. Join an all-star team. Take real ownership. Push boundaries. Build things that matter.

We’re looking for a Research Engineer to join our AI Pentest team and build the feedback loops that make our pentesting agents improve over time. You’ll use traces, evals, experiments, and production data to incrementally improve the agent harness and architecture, turning agent failures into measurable gains in vulnerability discovery, verification, and reporting.

Responsibilities

• Make our agents measurably better at finding, verifying, and reporting vulnerabilities.

• Design automated feedback loops that convert agent traces and failures into improvements of the agent harness.

• Run data-driven experiments with different agentic architectures, workflows, tools, prompts, and eval strategies.

• Build evals, benchmarks, and regression tests to measure progress and prevent regressions.

• Improve the reliability, performance, accuracy, and cost-efficiency of our AI pentesting platform.

• Ship validated improvements to production and own them end-to-end.

• Strong Python skills.

• Hands-on experience building with LLMs, AI workflows, agents, evals, or other AI-native systems.

• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to ship production-quality systems independently.

• Ability to reason from traces, logs, metrics, and failure cases to improve system behavior.

• Data-driven mindset: comfortable designing experiments, measuring impact, and making trade-offs between quality, speed, cost, and reliability.

• Security affinity, with hacking, pentesting, bug bounty, or application security experience as a strong plus.

• Self-starter who thrives in ambiguous environments without a rigid structure.

What you can expect:

• High-impact position in a fast-growing company.

• Fast growth of responsibility.

• Competitive salary package.

• A company that sticks to its values in an open and informal atmosphere (see our culture page on the website for more details).

• Flexibility in working hours.

You will be recruited based on competencies. Qualities of people are decisive, regardless of gender, religion, ethnic origin, age, sexual orientation, or disability.