Research Engineer

Founding Research Engineer - AI & Defence

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📍 San Francisco | Onsite

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I’m working with a highly ambitious defense AI startup building technology to detect and conduct a novel class of AI-powered cyber operation. This is not conventional cybersecurity, vulnerability research or zero-day hunting.

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The technical challenge sits much closer to elite quantitative research, market microstructure and applied machine learning.

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You’ll work with petabyte-scale, multimodal time-series data refreshing in under one second, helping build the full prediction and learning stack:

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→ Stream and capture continuously refreshing data at scale

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→ Convert noisy, often ungrounded signals into useful representations

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→ Model the future behaviour of actors within complex environments

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→ Combine classical statistical methods with deep learning and transformers

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→ Build agents that learn new strategies from sparse, long-horizon reward signals

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→ Shape the technical direction of the company as an early engineering hire

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The strongest candidates will be highly quantitative, empirically minded and comfortable working on ambiguous research problems. You may currently be a Quantitative Researcher or Quantitative Developer within a top systematic trading environment.

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Relevant backgrounds could also include:

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• Systematic trading and market microstructure

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• Applied mathematics or statistics

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• Signal processing

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• Machine learning and sequential modelling

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• Computational social science

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• Intelligence or national-security technology

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Prior cybersecurity experience is not required.

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The company is already revenue-generating, has more than 18 months of runway and is backed by leading seed investors. The founding team has built and exited multiple companies, collectively returning more than $1B to investors.

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Its advisory network includes senior military leaders and former White House advisors.

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This is an opportunity to join a small, high-agency team working on problems with direct defense and intelligence relevance, where the earliest hires will influence both the core technology and how it is deployed.

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Base salaries up to $300k + Significant equity for founding Engineers

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No export controls, but you will need to either be a Green Card holder or US citizen to apply.

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Apply to Ethan to find out more

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elewis@acceler8talent.com