Assail is a Las Vegas–based cybersecurity startup building autonomous AI agents that deliver continuous, machine-speed penetration testing across APIs, web, and mobile applications.
<div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <h2 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.375rem] font-bold">Senior AI Researcher</h2> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Assail | AI Engineering | Reports to VP of AI Engineering | Remote-friendly, Boston HQ</strong></p> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <h3 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold">About Assail</h3> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Assail builds autonomous offensive security. Our platform, Ares, finds vulnerabilities in production systems by reasoning about them the way an experienced attacker would — chaining flaws across APIs, web applications, and mobile surfaces to surface the exploits that scanners miss and human testers run out of time to find.</p> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">We train our own models. Dagger is our 14B-parameter offensive security model, fine-tuned for vulnerability discovery and exploit reasoning. Javelin is our co-evolutionary self-training architecture, where attacker and defender models train against each other to push capability further than either could reach alone. The research surface is wide open, the domain is consequential, and the work ships into a platform that's actively used against hardened enterprise targets.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"> </p> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <h3 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold">The Role</h3> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">We're hiring our first dedicated AI Researcher to advance the core models powering Ares. You'll work alongside our VP of AI Engineering and a small AI engineering team, with direct collaboration with our CEO — a researcher and practitioner with 26 years of offensive security experience, contributions to the OWASP API Security Top 10, and a permanent exhibit at The Mob Museum.</p> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">This is a research role, not an applied ML role. You'll own original research on offensive security agents — how they reason, plan, use tools, and operate autonomously over long horizons. You'll design experiments end-to-end, build the evaluation infrastructure the field doesn't yet have, and translate research wins into capability that ships.</p> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">The feedback loop is fast and adversarial. Research that proves out goes into production. Research that doesn't gets killed quickly so the next bet can start.</p> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <h3 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold">What You'll Do</h3> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <ul class="[li_&]:mb-0 [li_&]:mt-1 [li_&]:gap-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [&:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-disc flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3"> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Drive original research on offensive security agents — reasoning, planning, tool use, and autonomous long-horizon operation</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Advance Dagger's post-training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning, RL from verifier signals, LoRA adaptation, and evaluation against adversarial benchmarks</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Extend Javelin's co-evolutionary self-training architecture: curriculum design, self-play dynamics, and reward modeling for security-specific outcomes</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Design and execute experiments end-to-end, from hypothesis through writeup</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Build internal evaluation harnesses that measure capability rigorously, where no public benchmark exists</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Translate research into production handoffs to AI Engineering — model cards, deployment notes, and known failure modes</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Contribute to Assail's external research voice through papers, talks, responsible disclosures, and technical writing</li> <li class="whitespace-normal break-words pl-2">Collaborate with engineering teammates on research methodology and experimental design</li> </ul> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <h3 class="text-text-100 mt-3 -mb-1 text-[1.125rem] font-bold">What We're Looking For</h3> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">You don't need every item on this list. We care more about depth where you have it than breadth where you don't.</p> </div> </div> <div> <div class="standard-markdown grid-cols-1 grid [&_>_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]"><strong>Core experience that matters most:</strong></p> </div> </div> <d