Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Elastic is a Search AI Company that provides cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability through its Elastic Search AI Platform. The Principal Security Research Engineer will shape Elastic Security's detection capabilities by conducting threat research and detection engineering focused on AI security, including testing GenAI applications, agentic systems, and LLM-backed products. The role also involves developing security protections, presenting research findings, and using AI-assisted techniques to improve threat research and detection workflows.
Responsibilities
- Design and carry out security tests for GenAI applications, agentic systems, and LLM-backed products. These tests will check for various attack types. They include prompt injection, indirect injection, retrieval poisoning, tool misuse, sensitive data extraction, and unsafe delegation
- Investigate new multi-domain threat vectors and attack methodologies to stay ahead of emerging risks and translating these into new security protections (e.g. detection rules)
- Create and present findings to enhance team knowledge and community awareness
- Apply AI-assisted techniques to expand coverage and accelerate validation. This may include developing new capabilities and Elastic AI workflows to streamline our threat research and detection engineering processes
Skills
- You should have experience running penetration tests or vulnerability assessments on web applications, or APIs
- Experience as a Red Team operator is also valuable
- You should understand the OWASP Top 10 and have some exposure to the OWASP LLM Top 10 or MITRE ATLAS
- Additionally, you need to be able to triage findings
- You should communicate risks clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
- You should have hands-on experience using LLM tools for security testing, research, or daily tasks
- You need to understand how LLMs work
- This includes context windows, tool use, RAG, and agentic chaining
- You should have experience using AI-assisted development tools
- Proficiency in modern AI/ML frameworks and hands-on experience integrating LLM APIs into production applications
- You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
- Previous successes in presenting findings and insights to technical audiences
- Proven ability to seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or scrum teams based on dynamic business priorities
- Knowledge of AI testing tools or frameworks, such as Garak, PyRIT, PromptBench, Inspect AI, or similar (including personal research or experiments) is a plus
- Experience with Elastic Security Solution and proficiency in writing or validating detections using a query language (e.g. EQL, KQL, ESQL) is a bonus
Benefits
- This role is currently eligible to participate in Elastic's stock program.
- A company-matched 401k with dollar-for-dollar matching up to 6% of eligible earnings.
- Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
- Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
- Generous number of vacation days each year
- We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service
- Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
- Minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave
Company Overview
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