Staff AI Software Engineer

Staff AI Software Engineer

Bishop Fox is the leading authority in offensive security, providing solutions ranging from continuous penetration testing, red teaming, and attack surface management to product, cloud, and application security assessments. Our managed service platform, service innovation, and culture of excellence continue to gather accolades from industry award programs, including Fast Company, Inc., SC Media, and others. For more than 16 years, we've been contributing and giving back to the security community. We've published more than 16 open source tools and 50 security advisories in the last five years alone.

Who You Are

This isn't just another engineering role. You'll be joining what's essentially a startup within Bishop Fox – all the innovation and rapid iteration of an early-stage venture, powered by the resources and reputation of an established security leader.

You are an experienced AI engineer who thrives on building real systems that operate in messy, unpredictable environments. You care deeply about reliability, evaluation, and scale—not just whether something works once, but whether it works consistently in production.

Your mission? Build autonomous AI agents that identify genuine vulnerabilities in production applications, capable of thinking, adapting, and hacking like the world's top penetration testers.

What You Will Do

Pioneer AI-Driven Security Testing

• Design and build intelligent autonomous security testing agents using large language models and cutting-edge AI/ML techniques
• Create systems that can autonomously perform reconnaissance, identify vulnerabilities, and execute sophisticated attack chains
• Push the boundaries of what's possible when artificial intelligence meets offensive security
• Build robust planning, tool-use, and failure-handling mechanisms for agents operating in real-world, unpredictable applications

Revolutionize Pen Testing at Scale

• Develop services that think and act like elite attackers, but operate 24/7 across thousands of targets
• Transform manual testing processes into intelligent, scalable automation pipelines
• Build systems that continuously evolve and improve their attack strategies
• Implement long-running agent memory and context management so agents retain state, avoid redundant actions, and accumulate application knowledge

Integrate with Enterprise-Grade Infrastructure

• Connect your AI agents into Bishop Fox's Cosmos cloud platform
• Scale your creations to serve Fortune 100 clients with enterprise-level reliability
• Design architectures that can handle massive concurrent testing operations
• Develop browser and application interaction infrastructure that enables agents to navigate, interact with, and test modern web applications

Experiment & Innovate Rapidly

• Prototype breakthrough approaches to AI-driven security testing
• Build sophisticated feedback loops that make your agents smarter over time
• Implement safety mechanisms and ethical guardrails for responsible AI deployment
• Measure, iterate, and continuously enhance agent performance
• Design evaluation and monitoring systems that distinguish real vulnerabilities from false positives or hallucinated findings

Collaborate with Elite Security Minds

• Work directly with world-class penetration testers and security researchers
• Partner with data scientists and AI specialists to solve novel technical challenges
• Contribute to a team culture where hacking expertise meets cutting-edge artificial intelligence
• Apply real-world production feedback from customer environments to refine agent behavior and system reliability

Your Experience

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems
• Deep AI/ML expertise – hands-on experience with LLMs, agent frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, CrewAI), or autonomous AI systems
• Advanced programming skills in Python and Golang with clean, scalable code practices
• Full-stack capabilities – comfortable building robust APIs, designing database schemas, and working with modern frontend frameworks (React/TypeScript experience valued)
• Practical experience designing, evaluating, and improving agent reliability, including handling failures, edge cases, and non-deterministic behavior
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes)
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices for reliable deployments
• Ability to architect systems that can scale from prototype to enterprise-grade solutions
• Must be based in the San Francisco Bay Area; remote-first with occasional, ad hoc in-office meetings only when necessary.

The Right Mindset

• Portfolio over pedigree – we care more about what you've built than where you learned it
• Excitement about autonomous systems and AI agents that can operate independently
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid iteration in a fast-moving environment
• Strong judgment in choosing the right tools, models, and architectural approaches for real-world constraints

Bonus Multipliers

• Experience in penetration testing, red teaming, ethical hacking, or security research
• Understanding of common vulnerabilities, attack vectors, and security frameworks
• Knowledge of security tools and methodologies (but we'll teach you what you don't know!)
• Open-source contributions, especially in AI/automation or security domains
• Hackathon victories or compelling side projects that demonstrate your creativity
• Experience in startup environments or greenfield product development
• Publications, talks, or thought leadership in AI or security communities
• Familiarity with multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, or swarm intelligence
• Experience with vector databases, RAG pipelines, or advanced prompt engineering
• Understanding of AI safety, alignment, and responsible AI development practices

Our Values

We strive to live by our values every day, in support of our core tenets, which are to deliver the highest quality of work for our clients, quality of life for our team, and quality of business for our industry and our future.

• Be Excellent to Each Other
• Do the Right Thing
• Do What You'll Say You'll Do
• Get Better Together
• Give a Sh*t

We Offer a Variety of Benefits and Perks, Such As:

• Generous Time Off and Company-Wide Holidays
• Health Insurance Options Including Medical, Dental, Vision
• Retirement; 401k Matching for Traditional and Roth Accounts in the US
• Work From Home Support
• Monthly Allowance for Cell Phone and Internet
• Training Budget
• Paid Parental Leave

This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States of America for the duration of employment without sponsorship.

Bishop Fox is an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex including sexual orientation and gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. All new hires must pass a background check as a condition of employment.

Interested? Apply today!