Senior Engineer, Cyber AI R&D

Hybrid, DMV area / Remote (with travel)

SIXGEN's mission is to deliver agile, mission-ready cybersecurity solutions that empower government and critical infrastructure organizations to stay ahead of advanced cyber threats. We combine innovation, deep expertise, and cutting-edge capabilities to uncover vulnerabilities, protect vital systems, and ensure operational superiority in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

POSITION OVERVIEW

• Position: Senior Engineer, Cyber AI R&D
• Job Type: Full Time
• Location: Hybrid or Remote. Travel to the DMV area and customer sites may be required.
• Clearance Requirements: TS/SCI
• Travel: Up to 20%, depending on location and customer needs

ABOUT THE TEAM

SIXGEN supports cyber and intelligence missions by helping government and commercial organizations overcome global cybersecurity challenges. Our highly skilled operators conduct research and assessments based on real-world threats, simulating adversaries and malicious actors to deliver actionable findings on critical assets and infrastructures. Our program planners advise mission owners to bring rapid solutions to intelligence leaders. Using innovative processes, tools, and techniques, we predict and overcome cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

SIXGEN is investing in applied AI to expand what our cyber operators, engineers, researchers, and customers can accomplish. We are developing new capabilities that combine modern AI systems with deep cybersecurity expertise, with particular emphasis on tools that improve the speed, scale, and effectiveness of highly specialized technical work.

The Senior Engineer, Cyber AI R&D will help turn those ideas into working capabilities.

This is a hands-on research and development role focused on building, testing, and refining AI-enabled cybersecurity products and prototypes. You will work at the intersection of software engineering, cybersecurity, and applied AI, developing new approaches to problems such as vulnerability research, reverse engineering, malware analysis, code analysis, security testing, and cyber operations.

The right candidate enjoys working on problems that do not yet have established solutions. You should be comfortable exploring an idea, building enough of it to understand whether it works, measuring the results, and iterating rapidly based on what you learn.

This role is less about researching AI in isolation and more about applying it to difficult cybersecurity problems. Successful candidates will combine strong engineering fundamentals with curiosity, experimentation, and enough cyber domain knowledge to recognize where AI can create meaningful operational advantage.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Research and develop AI-enabled cybersecurity capabilities, building prototypes and experimental systems that apply modern models and autonomous workflows to real cyber problems.
• Build working software quickly, translating ideas and technical concepts into functional prototypes that can be evaluated by engineers, operators, and customers.
• Apply AI to specialized cyber workflows, including vulnerability research, reverse engineering, malware analysis, code analysis, exploit development, security testing, and offensive or defensive operations.
• Develop agentic systems and workflows, integrating models with tools, APIs, software environments, cyber tooling, data sources, and human operators.
• Experiment with new models and techniques, evaluating whether emerging AI capabilities provide measurable improvements over existing approaches.
• Develop product concepts through technical iteration, helping move promising ideas from initial experimentation toward usable internal tools and customer-facing capabilities.
• Design and run technical evaluations, measuring capability, accuracy, reliability, performance, cost, and operational usefulness rather than relying solely on demonstrations.
• Integrate AI models into real software systems, including model APIs, local or hosted inference, retrieval systems, tool execution, workflow orchestration, and application interfaces.
• Build supporting infrastructure and tooling, including test harnesses, evaluation frameworks, datasets, integrations, and automation needed to develop and assess AI-enabled cyber systems.
• Work directly with cyber operators and subject matter experts, understanding their workflows, identifying opportunities for automation, and iterating based on real-world feedback.
• Partner with senior technical leaders and product engineers, helping validate new technical approaches and mature successful prototypes toward broader product implementation.
• Investigate failures and limitations, identifying where models break down and developing engineering approaches that improve reliability and operational usefulness.
• Document technical findings, capturing architectures, experiments, results, implementation decisions, and lessons learned so successful work can be reproduced and extended.
• Stay current with developments in AI and cybersecurity, evaluating new models, frameworks, research, tools, and techniques for practical application within SIXGEN.
• Support demonstrations and technical customer engagements, helping communicate and demonstrate emerging capabilities when appropriate.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering, cybersecurity engineering, applied research, or a related technical field.
• Strong hands-on software engineering skills and experience designing and building non-trivial software systems.
• Demonstrated ability to independently take a technical problem from concept through prototype, experimentation, and working implementation.
• Hands-on experience developing applications using large language models or other modern AI systems.
• Experience integrating models with APIs, tools, data sources, software environments, or external systems.
• Working knowledge of modern AI application patterns, including prompt engineering, retrieval, tool use, structured outputs, workflow orchestration, and agentic system design.
• Familiarity with cybersecurity concepts and at least one relevant technical domain such as vulnerability research, reverse engineering, malware analysis, application security, offensive security, security automation, or code analysis.
• Strong Python development skills and familiarity with additional languages commonly used in systems or cybersecurity development.
• Experience debugging complex systems and independently investigating unfamiliar technical problems.
• Ability to evaluate technologies critically and distinguish between compelling demonstrations and capabilities that can perform reliably in real-world environments.
• Ability to communicate technical ideas, experimental results, and engineering tradeoffs clearly to other engineers and technical stakeholders.
• Active TS/SCI clearance.
• S. Citizen.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Cybersecurity, Math, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience developing AI or autonomous systems specifically for cybersecurity applications.
• Hands-on experience with offensive security, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, exploit development, malware analysis, or similar technical cyber disciplines.
• Experience developing autonomous or semi-autonomous agents capable of interacting with development environments, command-line tools, security tooling, or other software systems.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted software engineering tools and coding agents.
• Experience with open-source and commercial language models, including model selection, hosted inference, local inference, and performance tradeoffs.
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, structured knowledge systems, or large-scale technical data processing.
• Familiarity with model evaluation, benchmarking, observability, and testing methodologies for AI-enabled systems.
• Experience building test harnesses, synthetic datasets, or evaluation environments for experimental systems.
• Familiarity with containerized environments, cloud infrastructure, Linux systems, and modern software development workflows.
• Experience working in an R&D organization, startup, advanced development group, or other environment where engineers rapidly prototype and evaluate new technical ideas.
• Experience transitioning prototypes into production software or operational capabilities.
• Familiarity with deploying AI systems in disconnected, controlled, classified, or resource-constrained environments.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

A successful Senior Engineer, Cyber AI R&D will consistently turn promising technical ideas into working software and useful evidence.

You will:

• Build prototypes that demonstrate whether new AI-enabled cyber concepts can work in practice.
• Rapidly learn unfamiliar technologies and apply them to real cybersecurity problems.
• Create tools that meaningfully improve how cyber operators and engineers perform specialized work.
• Identify technical limitations early and find practical ways to overcome them.
• Produce experiments and evaluations that help the team make informed product and engineering decisions.
• Work effectively across AI, cybersecurity, and software engineering disciplines.
• Turn successful experiments into increasingly mature capabilities that can transition into products or operational systems.
• Contribute new ideas while also executing effectively against broader technical direction.
• Develop a reputation as someone who can take an ambiguous technical problem and make it real.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

SIXGEN offers a competitive compensation package designed to reflect the technical expertise, independence, and impact expected of this role. Final compensation will be determined based on experience, qualifications, clearance level, and demonstrated technical capability.

Additionally, SIXGEN offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Employer-paid health insurance premiums (medical, dental, vision) for you and your family
• Employer-paid short/long term disability insurance and basic life/AD&D insurance
• 401K with a 4% employer contribution
• Professional development reimbursement options available (training, certification, education, etc.)
• Flexible and remote work policies for most positions
• Flexible PTO and holiday schedule

OUR COMMITMENT

SIXGEN is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We ensure that all applicants are considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, marital status, ancestry, protected veteran status, or any other protected group or class.

We are committed to fostering an inclusive culture that values diversity in our people, reflecting the communities we serve and our customer base. We strive to attract and retain a diverse talent pool and create an environment where everyone is empowered to be their authentic selves at work.