Software Engineer, Cybersecurity Benchmarks

Epoch AI is looking for a Software Engineer, Cybersecurity Benchmarks who will help us measure how capable frontier AI models are at cybersecurity, and keep those measurements safe to run. The role will involve building and owning cybersecurity benchmarks, securing our evaluation environments against AI escape, and using threat modelling to shape our evaluation strategy.

We are looking for a Research Engineer to help us build trustworthy, public evaluations of AI cybersecurity capabilities as part of our AI Benchmarking Hub. You will work closely with the benchmarking team, researchers, analysts and other engineers to design benchmarks, run them on our infrastructure, and make sure the results are accurate and feed into our research.

Your day-to-day activities will include building and maintaining cybersecurity benchmarks (primarily in the Inspect library), hardening the sandboxes they run in, and keeping our benchmarks running so we can evaluate new model releases quickly. An ideal candidate for this role might have a background in red teaming and sandboxing software, alongside strong software engineering experience and hands‑on familiarity with AI coding harnesses.

Your work will be key to giving researchers, developers and policymakers an independent, rigorous picture of what AI can do in cybersecurity.

Location: Fully remote. We are able to hire in many countries.

Work Hours: Full-time, flexible. We prefer candidates who can overlap with UTC–8 (Pacific Time) and UTC (Greenwich Mean Time).

Travel Requirement: None required. We prefer candidates who can travel to our three retreats per year.

Compensation: $150,000 to $350,000

Final date to receive applications: Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis

Start Date: As soon as selected candidate is available

Reports to: CTO

• Design, build and maintain cybersecurity benchmarks for AI within our evaluation infrastructure, primarily using the Inspect library

• Pitch and prototype your own ideas for new benchmarks and experiments

• Keep the suite running so we can evaluate new model releases quickly and painlessly

• Sandbox and harden our evaluation environments so highly capable AI models cannot escape them

• Stay current on how AI agents and coding harnesses interact with their environments

• Use threat modelling to inform our benchmarking approach and decide what we measure

• Provide strategic input on our AI cybersecurity evaluation strategy

• Integrate with AI providers and set up benchmarks to run on our infrastructure

• Work with researchers, analysts and other engineers to ensure evaluation data and outputs are accurate, insightful, and integrated into our research products and publications

• Strong software engineering experience, including several years building and maintaining complex systems and regularly contributing robust, maintainable code

• Experience sandboxing software against highly capable adversaries

• Red team experience ethically hacking software

• Familiarity with agentic AI use and coding harnesses

• Ideas and creativity: you can generate your own ideas for new benchmarks and experiments

• Motivation from Epoch AI’s mission to provide rigorous, independent insight into key trends in AI, including delivering public, trustworthy evaluations of AI capabilities

• Experience benchmarking AIs and running evaluations

• Experience setting up CTF infrastructure

• Experience using modern AI for red teaming or ethically hacking

• Knowledge of the inner workings of AI coding harnesses and tool calls

• Familiarity with

• A solid grasp of current AI trends

If you don’t tick all these boxes…