AI Security Research Engineer

AI Security Research Engineer

Toronto, Canada - Onsite

12+ Months Contract

Job Description:

Certifications: CISSP, OSCP, CSSLP or equivalent.

Exp 6+ years required .

Technical Security Research Engineer to research, prototype, evaluate, and operationalize emerging cybersecurity capabilities. This is a hands-on role for someone who can move from a research hypothesis to working code, proof-of-concept, product evaluation, and enterprise recommendation.

Responsibilities:

• Build agentic AI security harnesses, prototypes, and POCs for new cyber capabilities.
• Research AI Security, Agentic AI, Application Security, quantum/PQC, blockchain, and other emerging technologies.
• Develop and integrate agents, LLMs, APIs, security tools, automation, and test environments.
• Evaluate new cybersecurity products and startups through hands-on testing, benchmarking, and technical due diligence.
• Validate vendor claims and assess security, scalability, integration complexity, and enterprise applicability.
• Help transition successful research prototypes toward operational use.
• Present technical findings and recommendations to engineering, security leadership, and investment stakeholders.

Qualifications:

• Master's degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, AI, Computer Engineering, or related field; PhD welcomed.
• Strong hands-on software development skills, particularly Python, Java, Node, Go, C/C++ with experience in additional modern programming languages.
• Experience with LLMs, AI agents, tool calling, orchestration frameworks, APIs, cloud, containers, and security automation.
• Strong knowledge of Application Security, AI Security, vulnerability research, threat modeling, Secure development, Network security, infrastructure Security, Security Architecture and other security domains
• Demonstrated ability to design experiments, build prototypes, and evaluate emerging technologies.
• Strong technical writing and presentation skills.

Highly Valued:

• Research papers or presentations at recognized cybersecurity, AI, or systems forums.
• Experience with AI red teaming, autonomous penetration testing, agent security, or AI-native security tooling.
• Cybersecurity startup, founder, or early-stage product experience.
• Experience pitching to venture capital, corporate venture teams, accelerators, or investment stakeholders.
• Patents, open-source security projects, vulnerability research, or other demonstrated technical innovation.
• The ideal candidate combines the mindset of a security researcher, software engineer, and emerging-technology evaluator and is comfortable turning new ideas into measurable, working cybersecurity capabilities.