Research Engineer
LB15
Posted: 04/08/2026
- $300,000
- San Francisco
- Permanent
Founding Research Engineer - AI & Defence
đź“Ť San Francisco | Onsite
I’m working with a highly ambitious defense AI startup building technology to detect and conduct a novel class of AI-powered cyber operation. This is not conventional cybersecurity, vulnerability research or zero-day hunting.
The technical challenge sits much closer to elite quantitative research, market microstructure and applied machine learning.
You’ll work with petabyte-scale, multimodal time-series data refreshing in under one second, helping build the full prediction and learning stack:
→ Stream and capture continuously refreshing data at scale
→ Convert noisy, often ungrounded signals into useful representations
→ Model the future behaviour of actors within complex environments
→ Combine classical statistical methods with deep learning and transformers
→ Build agents that learn new strategies from sparse, long-horizon reward signals
→ Shape the technical direction of the company as an early engineering hire
The strongest candidates will be highly quantitative, empirically minded and comfortable working on ambiguous research problems. You may currently be a Quantitative Researcher or Quantitative Developer within a top systematic trading environment.
Relevant backgrounds could also include:
• Systematic trading and market microstructure
• Applied mathematics or statistics
• Signal processing
• Machine learning and sequential modelling
• Computational social science
• Intelligence or national-security technology
Prior cybersecurity experience is not required.
The company is already revenue-generating, has more than 18 months of runway and is backed by leading seed investors. The founding team has built and exited multiple companies, collectively returning more than $1B to investors.
Its advisory network includes senior military leaders and former White House advisors.
This is an opportunity to join a small, high-agency team working on problems with direct defense and intelligence relevance, where the earliest hires will influence both the core technology and how it is deployed.
Base salaries up to $300k + Significant equity for founding Engineers
No export controls, but you will need to either be a Green Card holder or US citizen to apply.
Apply to Ethan to find out more
elewis@acceler8talent.com
Ethan Lewis
Researcher