Vulnerability Researcher

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 and Anduril. We're looking for vulnerability researchers to help design and build our agentic systems that autonomously perform vulnerability research against real targets — firmware, network stacks, mobile OSes, IoT. That means wiring emulation (QEMU, Unicorn, Qiling), instrumentation (Frida, DynamoRIO), fuzzing, and exploit primitives into tool interfaces for agents, as well as the evaluation & benchmarking infrastructure to know whether any of it is working. 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, DiceGang, 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, 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. #J-18808-Ljbffr