AI Security Researcher

Remote: yes Posted: 2026-10-27

ABOUT COGENT

Cogent is an Applied AI Lab building the next generation of AI agents for cybersecurity. AI has fundamentally changed how attacks happen, allowing malicious actors to operate at unprecedented speed and scale. Cogent's "AI Taskforce" assesses petabytes of enterprise data to remediate these issues before critical breaches occur.

To stay at the cutting edge, we blend frontier research with real-world execution. Alongside our core product work, Cogent Research serves as our applied AI lab, providing the research horsepower needed to make truly agentic security workflows a reality. We partner with Fortune 500 companies to secure some of the most complex production environments in the world.

We're backed by Greylock & Bain Capital Ventures, and we've built a team with the best minds in applied AI. Our team is comprised of people from:

- Top universities like Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Waterloo

- Unicorn, high-growth companies like Scale AI, Databricks, Stripe, Tesla, Coinbase

- World class cybersecurity experts from Wiz, Abnormal AI, Zscaler

- Preeminent research labs like Deepmind and SAIL

We're hiring a Security Researcher to build the offensive side of our research - the attacker our defensive agents have to beat. You'll sit in Research and own the loop that turns real red team tradecraft into AI capability, shaping how offensive expertise becomes autonomous capability rather than just supplying the expertise.

- Design and build our red team agents. Architect the agent harness, the tools and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers they call, and the skills that encode how an operator actually works - from scoping and reconnaissance through payload development, delivery, Command and Control (for example Mythic), and post-exploitation toward the objective - turned into repeatable, agent-executable capabilities for our offensive agent and VR-1. You'll review the agents' runs and close the gaps.

- Push the agents to full-chain operations across every surface. Our red team agent covers application and code security today. You'll drive its extension into full attack chains - initial access, delivery and evasion, Command and Control, privilege escalation, and lateral movement - across Windows, Active Directory, and on-prem, and work with our cloud security researchers to extend coverage into cloud (identity and access management, misconfiguration, continuous integration and delivery) and network.