Senior AI Researcher

Assail is a company focused on autonomous offensive security, developing a platform that identifies vulnerabilities in production systems. The Senior AI Researcher will conduct original research on offensive security agents and collaborate closely with the AI engineering team to advance core models.

Responsibilities:

• Drive original research on offensive security agents — reasoning, planning, tool use, and autonomous long-horizon operation
• Advance Dagger's post-training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning, RL from verifier signals, LoRA adaptation, and evaluation against adversarial benchmarks
• Extend Javelin's co-evolutionary self-training architecture: curriculum design, self-play dynamics, and reward modeling for security-specific outcomes
• Design and execute experiments end-to-end, from hypothesis through writeup
• Build internal evaluation harnesses that measure capability rigorously, where no public benchmark exists
• Translate research into production handoffs to AI Engineering — model cards, deployment notes, and known failure modes
• Contribute to Assail's external research voice through papers, talks, responsible disclosures, and technical writing
• Collaborate with engineering teammates on research methodology and experimental design