Offensive Security RL Researcher
San Francisco$200k - $500kFull-timePosted 1w ago
About the role
Security-focused research role leading idler's cybersecurity evals and environments, with hands-on development and team management responsibilities.
Responsibilities
- Drive the roadmap for idler's cybersecurity evals and environments, and decide — using our cybersecurity capability map — which environments we build next and where we put engineering resources.
- Build and run the systems that produce those environments yourself; you'll write production code where it matters, not just spec it out for someone else to build.
- Recruit, onboard, and manage the part-time cybersecurity experts who review our environments for fairness, correctness, and quality.
- Work directly with researchers at frontier AI labs to understand what cybersecurity capabilities and data they want, and sell them the environments that meet it.
Qualifications
- 3+ years of experience in a professional cybersecurity role, with a track record that puts you in the top 5% of your peers by reputation.
- Deep hands-on experience in at least one of: web app pentesting, bug bounty hunting, vulnerability/zero-day research, hacking agents, or AI security.
- Well-connected within the security community — this makes recruiting and evaluating the part-time experts you'll manage far easier.
- Comfortable writing and shipping production code (Python, TypeScript, or similar). You don't need a decade of software engineering experience, but you need to build and maintain the systems your research depends on, not hand that off entirely.
- Strong written communication — you'll justify prioritization calls to researchers and explain findings to people who didn't do the work themselves.
Skills
Required:Security researchProduction codePythonWeb app pentesting / bug bounty / vulnerability research / hacking agents / AI securityWritten communication
Nice to have:TypeScript
Benefits
- Healthcare, 401(k), 15 days of PTO per year.
- Relocation assistance
- In-person in San Francisco
- $200K–$500K base salary + meaningful equity.
- We'd sponsor and co-publish AI security research under your name.
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Idler
Scale AI for reinforcement learning environments.
Idler builds reinforcement learning environments that teach AI models to code at expert human levels. We create training environments based on real-world coding scenarios that prepare models for the complex challenges they'll face in production.
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