AI Security & Control Researcher
Posted 1 Sep 2026
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 5+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- On-Site
- Contract
- Full-time
- Visa sponsorship
- Offered
No salary listed for this role.
THE OPPORTUNITY
THE OPPORTUNITY
Apollo Research works with most frontier AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Thinking Machines and others) to test their models before deployment and collaborate on fundamental scheming research. Our coding agent security product, Watcher, is deployed in production and monitors billions of agent tokens per month across engineering teams at agent-building scale-ups and enterprises.
We are looking for a security & control expert to help us design better threat models and control protocols against AI adversaries, and improve the effectiveness and security of Watcher.
This is truly a "start-up role" in the sense that you have significant say in shaping the direction of the role. This is an individual contributor role but could lead to management responsibilities eventually, if desired.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Threat modeling for coding agents
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Develop threat models for coding agents under the assumption that they could be misaligned or compromised. This includes near-term threats like AI agents leaking private internal data and long-term threats like agents sabotaging safety research.
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Treat coding agents through the lens of insider risk: they have credentials, access to code, network access, and the ability to execute arbitrary actions, just like a malicious insider would (see Control agenda).
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Map out kill chains and attack progressions similar to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, adapted for agentic AI. See e.g. the Agentic Loss-of-Control Threat Matrix for an example of a high-quality contribution.
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Build and maintain our “coding agent security levels” which define what level of robustness Watcher provides against different categories of failure modes. These levels should be concrete, testable, and usable both internally (to guide product priorities) and externally (to communicate our security posture to customers).
Failure mode library and literature
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Maintain our library of coding agent failure modes and keep it comprehensive, accurate, and current.
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Stay up to date with the academic and industry literature on coding agent security, AI security, and adjacent fields (prompt injection, deception, accidental security implications, supply chain attacks on AI systems, etc.).