[Hiring] Principal Researcher, AI Red Teaming @CrowdStrike

Role Description

The CrowdStrike Data Science team is looking for a Principal Researcher to lead the technical direction of our AI red teaming research. This is an individual contributor role at the top of the technical ladder. You do not manage people. You set the research agenda, you do the hardest research yourself, you build the tooling that makes it repeatable, and you raise the bar for the researchers around you.

Our mission is to find out what can make an AI agent do something it should not, and whether the controls hold. We study how agentic systems are influenced through the channels they act on:

• Tool results
• Files
• MCP servers
• Web content
• Skills
• Memory
• Inter-agent messages

We red team frontier models and the agentic systems built on them, and we score every attack on observed actions, not on transcripts. Findings go through coordinated disclosure, become reusable attack modules in our automated AI security testing platform, and gate what ships in CrowdStrike's own AI products.

As the Principal Researcher, you decide which questions the team studies next, you answer the ones nobody else can, and you are the final technical reviewer on every disclosure, attack class and lab design. You are measured on whether the research got better, whether it reached the outside world, and whether the seniors around you can now do what only you could do before.

Qualifications

• A public record of original security research: CVEs, coordinated disclosures, conference talks or peer-reviewed papers that you led.
• Deep hands-on expertise in offensive security: exploitation, vulnerability research or red teaming.
• Demonstrated research on LLMs or agentic systems: prompt and environment injection, tool-use abuse, jailbreaks, multi-agent attacks, or model evaluation under adversarial conditions.
• Strong Python and systems engineering skills.
• Practical understanding of how agentic systems are built.
• Experience setting technical direction for other researchers as a tech lead or principal.
• Exceptional written communication.

Requirements

• Bring the research subjects. Propose and prioritise the attack classes, agent target classes and frontier model behaviours the team studies, with a written rationale for each and a kill date.
• Red team frontier models and the agentic systems. Track how each model release shifts attack success, agent behaviour and the controls that hold, and publish the result.
• Conduct vulnerability research and security assessments on agentic ecosystems end to end: hypothesis, exploit, observed action, disclosure, patch verification.
• Deliver state-of-the-art research: internal research notes on a monthly cadence, external papers, conference talks and coordinated disclosures with vendor credit.
• Investigate failure modes personally where the evidence is hardest to get: multi-agent systems, long-horizon tasks, defences that look like they work.
• Design and write the tooling the research depends on: attack harnesses, action-trace capture, tool-call interception, payload converters, isolated lab targets and reproducible experiment runners.
• Turn each finding into a reusable attack module with an executing payload test in the team's automated AI security testing platform.
• Define the shared formats for attack content and action traces so red team output can be scored, replayed and reused by the benchmarking work without conversion.
• Own the external research agenda for AI red teaming: which venues, which disclosures, which collaborations, and the quality bar for anything that leaves the team.
• Review benchmark methodology from the other pillar for attacker realism, and accept review of your own findings for evidence quality.
• Communicate findings, limitations and risk clearly to engineering, product owners, legal and executives.

Benefits

• Market leader in compensation and equity awards
• Comprehensive physical and mental wellness programs
• Competitive vacation and holidays for recharge
• Paid parental and adoption leaves
• Professional development opportunities for all employees regardless of level or role
• Employee Networks, geographic neighborhood groups, and volunteer opportunities to build connections
• Vibrant office culture with world class amenities
• Great Place to Work Certified™ across the globe