Threat Research Engineer

Overview

Research emerging security threats, including AI coding agents, agent plugins and package ecosystems, and turn findings into protection for GitLab customers. This is a full-stack role spanning research through proof of concept, deployment and analysis.

What you'll do

• Research new attack surfaces and threat vectors, including AI coding agents, agent plugins, and package ecosystems.
• Find and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in open source projects and developer tools.
• Analyze software supply chain incidents and events.
• Build AI-powered workflows and agents that automate research, analysis, and detection.
• Build and maintain the cloud-based systems behind detection and advisory work.
• Improve the quality and coverage of vulnerability and malware advisories.
• Write up findings as blog posts and present them at conferences.

What you'll need

• Hands-on security experience in research, malware analysis, penetration testing, or security tooling, with an understanding of package ecosystems and software supply chain attacks.
• A developer mindset and an adversarial mindset: able to build systems and think about how to break them.
• Demonstrated experience using AI in real work, such as building with large language model (LLM) application programming interfaces (APIs) or agent frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, or agent software development kits (SDKs).
• Strong programming skills in Go or Python, with good software engineering practices, including testing, code review, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and writing maintainable code.
• Experience deploying and running production services on a public cloud.
• The ability to map attack vectors, explain trade-offs, and use data to move experiments forward, balancing quality, speed, and customer outcomes.
• Clear writing for engineers and a general audience, and keeping up with security and AI industry trends.

Nice to have

• Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) entries or published findings.
• Research on AI agents, LLM applications, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
• Blogs, talks, or open source security tools.
• Terraform or OpenTofu.
• Databases or data pipelines at scale.
• Reverse engineering.

Details

• Location: Bangalore, India.
• All roles are remote; some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements.