[Hiring] Staff AI Engineer @Rapid7

Role Description

Our Engineering organization is scaling its AI Engineering capabilities under new leadership, creating an opportunity to shape the next generation of AI at Rapid7. We’re looking for Staff AI Engineers to drive the design and delivery of sophisticated LLM and agentic AI systems, influencing technical direction across teams and solving complex, cross-functional challenges. You’ll establish engineering best practices, guide architectural decisions and mentor other engineers, helping translate customer needs into scalable AI solutions that advance our product and platform capabilities.

About the Team

• AI is reshaping cybersecurity on both sides.
• Attackers can use AI to strike at machine speed, and only AI-powered defense can keep up.
• Organizations can only adopt AI with confidence if it is secure.
• Rapid7 sits at the intersection of security and AI, building industry-defining products for this new era.
• The AI Engineering team builds the AI that powers our security platform.
• We combine open-source and frontier LLMs, AI agents, and fast predictive models with over 20 years of Rapid7 security expertise.
• Our work drives core use cases across Detection and Response and Exposure and Remediation.

About the Role

As a Staff AI Engineer, your primary responsibility will be to design, build and ship LLM and agentic AI systems across Rapid7’s security products, owning the technical solutions for your area end to end. You will:

• Lead the design and architecture of LLM and agentic AI systems within Detection and Response and Exposure and Remediation.
• Recommend model strategy for your projects, including when to use frontier or open-source models.
• Fine-tune, distill and post-train open-source LLMs on security data.
• Apply and improve engineering practices for context engineering, inference optimization and evaluation.
• Establish evals as the release gate for the AI systems you ship.
• Lead design reviews for your projects and work through complex technical trade-offs.
• Stay hands-on by prototyping and building critical model, training and inference code.
• Mentor engineers on your team and partner with Product and platform teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software or ML engineering experience including 2+ years building production LLM or agentic AI systems.
• A Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI or a related field is preferred, or equivalent practical experience.
• A track record of leading the delivery of scalable, production-grade AI systems.
• A deep understanding of LLMs, including transformer architecture, attention, tokenization and positional encodings.
• Advanced PyTorch skills, including custom model code, training loops, mixed precision and distributed training.
• Hands-on fine-tuning and post-training of open-weight LLMs.
• Experience with context engineering and defining evaluation strategy and benchmarks for LLM and agent systems.
• Strong knowledge of inference optimization.
• Strong predictive AI, classical ML, distributed systems and Python fundamentals.
• Lead AI projects or programs of moderate scope and risk.
• Takes ownership of complex technical outcomes across teams.
• A strong communicator who can explain complex technical concepts.
• Builds strong cross-functional partnerships across Engineering, Product and other teams.
• Translates customer needs into scalable AI solutions.
• Embody core values to foster a culture of excellence.

Benefits

• Annual salary range for this role is $186,500.00 - 252,300.00 USD.
• Salary ranges may vary based on geographical location.
• This range does not include variable/incentive compensation, equity and benefits.

Company Description

At Rapid7, our vision is to create a secure digital world for our customers, our industry, and our communities. We do this by harnessing our collective expertise and passion to challenge what’s possible and drive extraordinary impact.