Member of Technical Staff - Research, Cyber

The posting, as Vals AI wrote it

Note: This is an application for those specifically interested in building benchmarks to assess cyber capabilities. If you are interested in other domains, please see our general research posting https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/vals-ai/7f54d989-4999-4857-b480-e6d113a263aa. We encourage you to only apply to one research posting.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for an exceptional researcher to design and build the next generation of AI benchmarks for cybersecurity. You will create high-impact, challenging evaluations that push the boundaries of what we can measure in foundation models. This role is ideal for someone with deep research expertise who wants to see their work directly influence how the world evaluates AI systems.

You will lead the design and development of novel benchmarks that assess real-world capabilities and risks of LLMs. Our benchmarks shape how foundation models are developed and generative AI applications are built. We work with every major foundation model lab - along with leading financial institutions and the application-layer companies pushing the frontier forward. Our work has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Bloomberg.

We are building the standard for evaluating the ability of LLMs to perform real-world tasks. You will be at the forefront of defining what that standard looks like.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design and develop novel, high-impact benchmarks that assess challenging real-world capabilities for cybersecurity
• Conduct research to ensure our benchmarks are valid, reliable, and meaningful
• Collaborate with foundation model labs and enterprise security teams to understand evolving evaluation needs
• Analyze model performance across benchmarks and articulate results
• Publish research findings and contribute to the broader security and evaluation research communities
• Work closely with the infrastructure team to implement your benchmark designs at scale
• Stay current with the latest developments in LLM cyber capabilities and evaluation methodologies

REQUIREMENTS

• Cybersecurity experience: Hands-on work in security, e.g., as a security engineer, penetration tester, red teamer or vulnerability researcher. You may have found and reported vulnerabilities through bug bounty programs or CVEs.
• Systems depth: Strong grounding in operating systems, cloud infrastructure and networking.
• Interest in benchmarking: You care about measuring capability rigorously, not just demonstrating it. Ideally, you've built cyber evals, CTF challenges or security benchmarks before.
• AI-forward: You already use LLMs in your security work and want to work with them every day.
• Communication: Ability to clearly communicate complex research ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Collaboration: Experience working in research teams and integrating feedback.
• Location: We are an in-person team in San Francisco and will support relocation or transp

[…]
n.com/company/bloomberg/ and new investors Hudson River Trading https://www.linkedin.com/company/hudson-river-trading/ and NextLadder Ventures https://www.linkedin.com/company/nextladderventures/.

Tech stack: We use Python for most things at Vals AI. Our platform is built on Django, with a React frontend. All of the infra is on AWS using CDK for IaC.

What We're Looking For

• Learning velocity: The role encompasses a wide variety of tasks. Rather than expecting you to be an expert on Day 1, we are looking for someone who can learn new skills and technologies quickly.
• Ownership: Working in a small, talent-dense team, we expect everyone to show initiative to build where it's needed, not where it's asked. We strive for autonomy over consensus.
• Intensity: The LLM landscape is constantly changing. Foundation model labs are continuously pushing the frontier. The unicorn companies that will emerge from this technology shift are being built now. Those that win will have an incredibly high speed of execution.
• Solution-oriented mindset: We're looking for people who see opportunities to craft solutions at each juncture, not those who pass hard problems to others or admit defeat.

Vals in the Media

• AI tools mostly fumble basic financial tasks, study finds https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/22/ai-tools-mostly-fumble-basic-financial-tasks-study-finds/
• The Winners (and Losers) of This New Vibe-Coding Benchmark Will Surprise You https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/the-winners-and-losers-of-this-new-vibe-coding-benchmark-will-surprise-you/91266938
• OpenAI’s Less-Flashy Rival Might Have a Better Business Model https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-business-model-ai-9e26b4ef
• Meta Announces New AI Model in Major Test of Company’s Ambitions https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-model-muse-spark-09ceeac5
• DeepSeek’s Sequel Set to Extend China’s Reach in Open-Source A.I. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/business/china-ai-deepseek-open-source.html