Member of Technical Staff - Research, Cyber at Vals AI in San Francisco, CA

Job description

About the role We are looking for an exceptional researcher to design and build the next generation of AI benchmarks for cybersecurity. You will create high-impact, challenging evaluations that push the boundaries of what we can measure in foundation models. This role is ideal for someone with deep research expertise who wants to see their work directly influence how the world evaluates AI systems. You will lead the design and development of novel benchmarks that assess real-world capabilities and risks of LLMs. Our benchmarks shape how foundation models are developed and generative AI applications are built. We work with every major foundation model lab - along with leading financial institutions and the application-layer companies pushing the frontier forward. Our work has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Bloomberg. We are building the standard for evaluating the ability of LLMs to perform real-world tasks. You will be at the forefront of defining what that standard looks like. What you'll do • Design and develop novel, high-impact benchmarks that assess challenging real-world capabilities for cybersecurity • Conduct research to ensure our benchmarks are valid, reliable, and meaningful • Collaborate with foundation model labs and enterprise security teams to understand evolving evaluation needs • Analyze model performance across benchmarks and articulate results • Publish research findings and contribute to the broader security and evaluation research communities • Work closely with the infrastructure team to implement your benchmark designs at scale • Stay current with the latest developments in LLM cyber capabilities and evaluation methodologies Requirements • Cybersecurity experience: Hands-on work in security, e.g., as a security engineer, penetration tester, red teamer or vulnerability researcher. You may have found and reported vulnerabilities through bug bounty programs or CVEs. • Systems depth: Strong grounding in operating systems, cloud infrastructure and networking. • Interest in benchmarking: You care about measuring capability rigorously, not just demonstrating it. Ideally, you've built cyber evals, CTF challenges or security benchmarks before. • AI-forward: You already use LLMs in your security work and want to work with them every day. • Communication : Ability to clearly communicate complex research ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences. • Collaboration : Experience working in research teams and integrating feedback. • Location: We are an in-person team in San Francisco and will support relocation or transportation as needed. Nice to haves • You've previously worked as a security engineer at a security company or on an in-house security team, and/or you have experience on an AI or ML team at a security company • Strong ties to the security community: CTF teams, conference talks, open-source security tools, or research collaborations, published security research, papers or well-read technical write-ups What we offer • Highly competitive salary and meaningful ownership. Excellence is well rewarded. • Relocation and transportation support • Health/dental insurance coverage • Lunch and dinner provided, free snacks/coffee/drinks • Unlimited PTO • $1,500 housing stipend (within one-mile radius) • Collaborate with leading AI labs and work on the front lines of AI development and evaluations • Opportunity to publish and present your work About us Founding team : The core methodology behind this platform comes from NLP evaluation research we conducted at Stanford. We raised a $5M seed from some of the top institutional and angel investors in the valley. Our team has prior work experience at NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir and HRT. Collectively, we have over 300 citations in our published work. Our early team includes Stanford PhDs, ex-Jane Street quants, and the first designer at Snorkel. We recently announced our $40M Series A at a $400M valuation, led by