AI Red Team Engineer

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design and run red-teaming campaigns combining severity-graded failure-mode injection into real trajectories, static monitoring benchmarks (e.g. MonitoringBench), and dynamic off-policy control red-teaming.

• Identify novel attack surfaces monitors haven't been tested against.

• Build and maintain automated red-teaming pipelines that attack monitors at scale, rather than relying on one-off manual probing.

• Design iterative adversarial red-team/blue-team games, working with RS (Control) on the blue-team side to keep escalating attack difficulty as monitors improve.

• Track the research literature and real-world incidents on agent failure modes, monitor evasion, and adversarial robustness.

• Turn each campaign into specific, actionable recommendations for monitor developers e.g. on time of intervention, user authorisation, trust boundaries, and monitor visibility

• Write up campaign findings as external publications and internal reports.

• Feed findings back into Watcher's monitor development and Apollo's blue-teaming research, so lessons learned externally harden our own product.

JOB REQUIREMENTS

Must-haves

• 2+ years of experience in offensive security, adversarial ML, or red-teaming of AI systems.

• Strong experience with AI coding agents, extensive use of, comparison of, or direct development of frontier coding agents.

• Experience designing and executing structured adversarial testing campaigns

• Strong Python programming skills

• Strong written communication as you will produce publications and campaign write-ups that need to be clear and credible externally.

• Demonstrated ability to work independently on open-ended adversarial problems.

Good-to-haves

• Familiarity with AI safety concepts, particularly agent-related risks

• Experience with LLM-as-a-judge setups or AI monitoring more broadly

• Background in penetration testing, CTFs, or computer security more broadly.

We want to emphasize that people who feel they don't fulfill all of these characteristics but think they would be a good fit for the position nonetheless are strongly encouraged to apply. We believe that excellent candidates can come from a variety of backgrounds and are excited to give you opportunities to shine.

REPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS

• Run a red-teaming campaign against a frontier lab's monitor : work through real coding sessions with injected attacks across a range of failure modes, identify improvement areas, and deliver actionable recommendations the partner lab can implement.

• Build an automated red-teaming pipeline that attacks Watcher's monitors at scale, rather than relying on one-off manual red-teaming.

• Investigate a new attack surface : an emerging agent capability or novel evasion vector not yet in Apollo's failure mode catalog and produce a write-up and recommendations for the monitoring team.

BENEFITS

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.

• Salary: 100k - 200 GBP (~150k - 270k USD)

• Flexible work hours and schedule

• Unlimited vacation

• Unlimited sick leave

• Up to 6 months of paid parental leave

• Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance

• Retirement savings with competitive employer matching (e.g. 401(k) for US employees)

• Lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays

• Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences

• A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget

• Relocation support and visa fees (if applicable)

LOGISTICS

• Time Allocation : Full-time

• Location : This is an in-person role working out of our London or San Francisco office. We offer flexible working hours and wfh arrangements.

• Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in both the UK and US. Sponsorship isn't guaranteed for every role or candidate, but if we make you an offer, we'll work with you to find the right visa route.