Senior/Staff Security Researcher

Semgrep

Senior Security Researcher building detection systems at Semgrep for evolving AI security challenges. Collaborating with teams to enhance application security through innovative methodologies.

Posted 7/24/2026full-timeRemote • Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $190,000 - $319,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates strong application security expertise with a focus on vulnerability detection and analysis across multiple languages and frameworks. Proficient in building and operating LLM systems, with a builder's mindset for automation and a commitment to continuous learning.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Application Security ExpertiseVulnerability DetectionLLM/Agent Systems ExperienceCode Auditing and PrototypingAutomation and Tooling Mindset

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Vulnerability ClassesCode AuditingPrompt EngineeringAgentic WorkflowsStatic SlicingTaint AnalysisMulti-Provider OrchestrationCost AwarenessLLM Tool UseEvaluation Frameworks

Soft Skills

CuriosityAutonomyCommunicationTeachingCollaboration

Tools & Technologies

Pydantic-AIMCPEvaluation Frameworks

Industry Keywords

Security WorkflowsAutomated TriageReal VulnerabilitiesCustomer CodebasesEmerging Threats

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Build detection at scale. Design and ship security workflows that combine deterministic analysis (taint, reachability, static slicing) with LLM reasoning to find real vulnerabilities (SSRF, IDOR, injection, auth gaps, supply-chain risk, and beyond) across many languages and frameworks.
Make LLMs viable for security-critical work. Engineer agentic pipelines and prompts that are precise, cost-aware, and trustworthy: atomic, well-scoped steps grounded in deterministic context, with attention to hallucination, confidence calibration, and which models see sensitive code.
Push on hard problems in automated triage and validation. Help close the gap between 'a finding exists' and 'this finding is real and worth a developer’s time,' so we can run workflows broadly and validate results at scale rather than by weeks of manual review.
Build and defend quality with evals. Design benchmarks and evaluation loops grounded in real customer codebases, not just synthetic datasets, so we actually know when a workflow is good.
Encode security judgment into tooling. Model vulnerability classes, taint sources/sinks/sanitizers, and security properties as reusable, versioned logic that scales across ecosystems.
Learn new territory fast. Dive into unfamiliar languages, frameworks, and technologies, figure out how vulnerabilities manifest there, and turn that understanding into detection.
Prototype new products. Partner with Engineering and Product to conceive, prototype, and validate new capabilities, writing real (if not always production-grade) code, with a strong sense for the customer and the user.
Share your work. Publish blog posts, give talks, produce cheat sheets and workshops, and represent Semgrep’s research to the wider community.
Lead and plan research with impact. Set the direction for research based on industry trends, emerging threats, and where the field is heading, and turn that into work that moves our products and the broader security community forward.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Strong application security expertise: fundamental vulnerability classes, how they arise and manifest across languages and frameworks, and the ability to go deep into the details.
Experience finding vulnerabilities and explaining their impact and context to the developers responsible for fixing them (as a security researcher, consultant, security engineer).
Genuine fluency writing and auditing code in two or more languages, enough to build tools and prototypes, not just read code.
A builder’s mindset: you’d rather automate a problem than do it by hand, and you get satisfaction from tooling that scales your impact many times over.
Real curiosity about, or hands-on experience with, applied AI/LLMs (agentic workflows, prompt engineering, RAG, evals, or LLM tool use), and clear-eyed judgment about where models help and where they don’t.
Experience building or operating LLM/agent systems in production: pydantic-ai, MCP, multi-provider orchestration, eval frameworks, cost/latency awareness.
A strong desire to keep learning, and excitement (not reluctance) when handed an unfamiliar language, framework, or technology.
Comfort operating with autonomy: you can take an ambiguous problem, break it into milestones, drive it forward, and own the outcome without close oversight.
Enjoyment in sharing what you learn, through writing, talks, and teaching, inside and outside Semgrep.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Our compensation package includes equity and benefits in addition to salary.
We invest in our employees’ well-being and long-term success through a competitive, market-aligned benefits program that meets or exceeds local market standards across all of the regions in which we hire.
Benefits offerings vary by location to reflect local requirements and norms.