AI Security & Control Engineer

About the role

We are building Watcher, a coding agent security product. 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. A security & control expert embedded in the product team with three functions: Research: Supporting Apollo's monitoring research with threat modeling, attack design, red-teaming, and trajectory analysis (~50%), Expert view: Bring a security expert's view of what security buyers need to make Watcher a better product (~25%), Product security: Improve the security posture of Watcher and Apollo's product infrastructure (~25%). This is truly a "start-up role" in the sense that you have many responsibilities and 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. The Product / Control team is a new team. Especially early on, you will work closely with Marius Hobbhahn (CEO & currently leads the monitoring team), Victor Gillioz (Research Scientist), Monika Jotautaitė (Research Scientist), and our product engineers: Jeremy Neiman, Zak Walters, Zen van Riel, and Srdjan Miletic. Furthermore you will interact with our other SWEs and researchers, since we intend to be "our own customer" by using our products internally for our research work. You can find our full team here. ABOUT APOLLO RESEARCH The rapid rise in AI capabilities offer tremendous opportunities, but also present significant risks. At Apollo Research, we're primarily concerned with risks from Loss of Control, i.e. risks coming from the model itself rather than e.g. humans misusing the AI. We're particularly concerned with deceptive alignment / scheming, a phenomenon where a model appears to be aligned but is, in fact, misaligned and capable of evading human oversight. We work on the detection of scheming (e.g., building evaluations), the science of scheming (e.g., model organisms), and scheming mitigations (e.g., anti-scheming and control). We closely work with multiple frontier AI companies, e.g. to test their models before deployment or collaborate on scheming mitigations. At Apollo, we aim for a culture that emphasizes truth-seeking, being goal-oriented, giving and receiving constructive feedback, and being friendly and helpful. If you're interested in more details about what it's like working at Apollo, you can find more information here. We're now also developing tools and products (see Watcher) that make it easier to prevent harms from AI systems widely deployed AI systems. Equality Statement: Apollo Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and are committed to providing equal opportunities to all, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation. HOW TO APPLY Please complete the application form with your CV. The provision of a cover letter is optional. Please also feel free to share links to relevant work samples. About the interview process: Our multi-stage process includes a screening interview, a take-home test (approx. 2 hours), 3 technical interviews, and a final interview with Marius (CEO). The technical interviews will be closely related to tasks the candidate would do on the job. There are no leetcode-style general coding interviews. If you want to prepare for the interviews, we suggest building simple monitors for coding agents and running them on your own Claude Code / Cursor / Codex / etc. traffic. Your Privacy and Fairness in Our Recruitment Process: We are committed to protecting your data, ensuring fairness, and adhering to workplace fairness principles in our recruitment process. To enhance hiring efficiency, we use AI-powered tools to assist with tasks such as resume screening. These tools are designed and deployed in compliance with internationally recognized AI governance frameworks. Your personal data is handled securely and transparently. We adopt a human-centred approach: all resumes are screened by a human and final hiring decisions are made by our team. If you have questions about how your data is processed or wish to report concerns about fairness, please contact us at info@apolloresearch.ai.

Requirements

• 5+ years in security roles in a hands-on technical capacity (not purely GRC/compliance). You'd need to be able to think structurally about threat modeling and failure modes. You need to be able to read code, understand infrastructure, and evaluate technical controls, not just write policies.
• Engineering mindset: You treat security as an engineering problem. You are capable of, and willing to, build custom solutions when the task demands it, rather than relying solely on 'glueing' together off-the-shelf tools. You prioritize automation and systems-level thinking to scale security, and you are comfortable leveraging AI to accelerate development.
• Direct experience with application security, cloud security, or product security. Ideally has owned or significantly contributed to the security posture of a product that handles sensitive customer data.
• Strong understanding of enterprise security buyer concerns. Ideally has been a security engineer or senior security leader at an organization that buys security tooling, or has worked closely enough with those buyers to internalize their priorities.
• Comfortable working in a small, fast-moving team where they'll need to context-switch between hands-on security work and strategic product thinking within the same week.
• Strong written communication. This role produces a lot of artifacts (threat models, security levels, questionnaire responses, failure mode documentation) and they need to be clear and precise.
• Strong nice-to-haves
• Experience with AI/ML systems security, LLM security, or AI control research. The field is young enough that deep experience here is rare, but any exposure significantly reduces ramp-up time.
• Detection engineering, SOC, or incident analysis experience. A part of this role is judging whether flagged agent behavior is genuinely malicious, and people who have triaged real-world alerts might ramp much faster.
• Familiarity with insider threat programs or insider risk frameworks. The mental model of "the coding agent is a potentially malicious insider" is useful for this role and someone who has worked on insider threats will pick it up faster.
• Experience in a security vendor or security product company. Building security products is different from consuming them, and someone who has done both will bridge the gap between "what CISOs want" and "what we can actually build" more effectively.
• Red teaming or offensive security background. Useful for the Watcher red-teaming responsibilities and for thinking adversarially about failure modes.
• Formal AI safety research background. Helpful but not necessary. We need security practitioners who can learn the AI safety context, not AI safety researchers who need to learn security.
• Explicitly not required
• Management experience. This is an IC role, at least initially.

Your Match

How well this role fits your profile.

Company Intel

What employees say

Worked at apolloresearch? Share your experience