Offensive AI Engineer

Role Description

You'll design and build LLM-powered systems and agents that integrate into and perform real offensive security work. Think of it as taking what a strong pentester or red teamer does intuitively and encoding it into systems that operate continuously, and at scale.

We're hiring two people for this team, and strength can come from either of two directions:

• You're an offensive security specialist, a pentester or red teamer, who wants to go all-in on AI engineering.
• You're a strong engineer / AI engineer who's drawn to offensive security and the agent problems that live there.

The work is the same either way. You only need to arrive deep in one of these two areas; we'll back you to grow fast in whichever side is newer to you.

What you'll work on

• Autonomous hacking agents.
• LLM agents that perform full attacks with minimal human intervention, including:
  • Reconnaissance
  • Web application exploitation
  • External exploration
  • Post-exploitation reasoning
  • Reporting
• Agent architecture.
• Planning loops, tool use, memory, and state management that let agents reason across long, multi-step attack chains without getting lost.
• Prompting and orchestration.
• Tool integration.
• AI feature development.
• Evaluation and benchmarking.
• False positive reduction.
• Production reliability.
• Broader applied AI and tool research.

This is a broad, evolving remit - the balance between agentic systems, applied AI, and research will shift as the problem does. You'll own your areas end to end, from a rough idea through to a shipped, working system, rather than being handed tightly scoped tickets.

Who you are

We expect strong candidates to come from one of two backgrounds:

• The offensive security specialist:
  • You've spent years on the offensive side and you've hit a ceiling on what one person can find by hand.
  • You've started building scripts, wrappers, and small agents to scale yourself, and you've realised AI engineering is where the leverage is.
  • You know what a real attacker actually does.
• The AI engineer:
  • You're a strong engineer who's gone deep on LLMs and agents.
  • You understand why most agent demos fall apart on the second step.
  • You've watched the offensive security space long enough to know it's where some of the most interesting agent problems live.

Whichever you are: you write good quality code, you think rigorously, you take problems and run with them end to end, and you want to become the most security-fluent person in the AI room and the most AI-fluent person in the security room.

Essential: what we need from everyone

• Hands-on experience building with LLMs using the likes of Claude Code, and Codex to build out projects and accelerate dev workflows.
• Engineering ability in Python or TypeScript.
• Some experience building AI solutions.
• Strong ownership and a self-starter mindset.
• A big-picture thinker, comfortable with ambiguity.
• Clear written communication.

Essential: depth in one of these two areas

• If you come from offensive security:
  • Professional offensive security experience: penetration testing, red teaming, bug bounty, or equivalent.
• If you come from AI / software engineering:
  • Strong production engineering: architecting and owning systems end to end, including deployments and CI/CD pipelines.

Strongly preferred

• Strong AI engineering experience with agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, custom orchestration).
• Experience evaluating LLM systems in production.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.

Benefits

• True remote flexibility - work from anywhere.
• No report-writing drudgery - we use our custom portal.
• Unlimited training to keep your skills sharp.
• Unlimited vacation - because burnout helps no one.
• Private medical insurance and pension scheme.
• Conference speaking bonuses.
• Hardware, software, lab environments, cloud credits and research materials you need to excel.
• A culture of radical candor, continuous improvement and technical excellence.

Company Description

At CovertSwarm, we take pride in pushing the boundaries of offensive security. Our team consists of passionate and humble professionals who value creativity, technical depth and delivering results that matter.

In this role, you will help shape how CovertSwarm attacks and reviews the infrastructure underpinning digital asset markets: keys, signers, wallets, APIs, smart contracts, settlement rails, cloud platforms, control planes and the humans operating them.

If you want to work at the intersection of offensive security, blockchain, encryption and financial infrastructure, we want to hear from you.

Ready to join the Swarm? Take the next step in your cybersecurity career by applying today. Let’s talk about how your skills, research mindset and offensive capability align with CovertSwarm’s mission to redefine offensive security.