AI Engineer: Offensive Security Agents
zealotDenver (CO)
About the role
AI Systems Engineer: Offensive Security Agents Zealot (zealotlabs.com) builds AI systems that find zero-days, emulate target devices, and develop working exploits for U.S. defense and intelligence customers. We're backed by tier-1 U.S. venture firms and industry leaders, and our team includes alumni of Anthropic, xAI, NSA, USCYBERCOM, Anduril, Unit 8200, and the Mossad.
What you'll do:
We're hiring an engineer who lives at the intersection of low-level systems and LLM-driven agents — someone who can read a binary and build the harness that lets an agent do the same. That means wiring emulation (QEMU, Unicorn, Qiling), instrumentation (Frida, DynamoRIO), fuzzing, and exploit primitives into tool interfaces for agents to reason over, as well as the evaluation & benchmarking infrastructure.
What we're looking for:
2–3+ years across systems programming (C/C++, Rust) and ML infrastructure Comfort with binary analysis, memory corruption classes, and modern mitigations (ASLR, CFI, PAC, MTE)Hands-on work with agent harnesses — orchestration, tool-use, eval loops — in production or at benchmark scale Fluency with at least one emulation stack (QEMU, Unicorn, Qiling, PANDA, FirmAE)Strong RE / debugger chops (GDB, IDA or Ghidra) and the patience to use them
Nice to have:
Pwn-heavy CTF experience (DEF CON finals, PPP, Dice Gang, Shellphish, Theori, Team Atlanta), public CVEs, conference talks, AIxCC / CGC participation, or kernel / baseband RE.Read this part carefully That list is what the fully-formed version of this role looks like. It's not a filter. If you're sharp, hungry, and funny, apply anyway — even if half the bullets read like a foreign language today. Tech can be learned. Spirit cannot. We've watched the right people pick up binary exploitation from scratch and outship ten-year veterans inside a year. Tell us what you've taught yourself recently and what you'd tear into first here.
Requirements: U.S. citizenship. TS/SCI clearance eligibility (existing preferred).
What we offer:
Competitive cash, meaningful early equity, a mission that matters, and hard problems nobody has solved yet.
Before you apply
Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.
Your profile is current
It's what we read first. Occupations, seniority and locations matter more than a long history.
Two examples you can talk through
Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.
A number in mind
What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.
Your notice period
Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.
Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.
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