Phaidra

Security Engineer

• Champion Secure Agentic AI Development: Drive the adoption of Phaidra’s Secure AI/ML Development Lifecycle (SAIDL) within the Agentic AI team. Adapt security practices to fit the iterative and experimental nature of Reinforcement Learning and agent development.
• Agentic Threat Modeling: Partner with researchers to model threats specific to autonomous agents. Beyond standard AI risks, you will analyze risks unique to agents, such as goal misalignment, reward hacking, infinite looping, and insecure tool execution (e.g., an agent executing a command that exceeds safety limits).
• Secure Agent Architecture & Safety Boundaries: Design secure-by-default architectures for autonomous agents. Crucially, this involves defining deterministic safety guardrails that sit between the probabilistic AI model and the physical hardware controls. Ensure "Zero Trust" applies to the agent—it should only have the minimum permissions needed to adjust specific parameters.
• Secure Agent Tools & Memory: Architect security controls for the "tools" the agent uses (APIs to read sensors or change settings) and the agent's long-term memory. Ensure the agent cannot be manipulated into using a tool to perform unauthorized actions or "poisoned" via its memory context.
• MLSecOps for RL Pipelines: Secure the training and simulation pipelines used for Reinforcement Learning. Ensure the integrity of the simulation environments (Digital Twins) used to train agents, preventing attackers from influencing agent behavior during the training phase.
• Adversarial Testing & Red Teaming: Lead AI Red Teaming exercises focused on behavioral manipulation. Can you trick the agent into making a suboptimal decision? Can you manipulate the observations the agent receives?
• Incident Preparedness: Develop incident response playbooks tailored for autonomous systems, focusing on "Kill Switches" and rapid rollback capabilities in the event of rogue agent behavior.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Build strong relationships with the Agentic AI researchers, SREs, and Data Scientists. Act as an enabler who helps them deploy powerful agents safely, rather than a blocker.

Senior Product Security Engineer