Software Design Engineer

Ascendion is a full service digital engineering solutions company. We make and manage software platforms and products that power growth and deliver captivating experiences to consumers and employees. Our engineering, cloud, data, experience design, and talent solution capabilities accelerate transformation and impact for enterprise clients. Headquartered in New Jersey, our workforce of 6,000+ Ascenders delivers solutions from around the globe. Ascendion is built differently to engineer the next.

We have a culture built on opportunity, inclusion, and a spirit of partnership. Come, change the world with us:

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Join a culture of high-performing innovators with endless ideas and a passion for tech. Our culture is the fabric of our company, and it is what makes us unique and diverse. The way we share ideas, learning, experiences, successes, and joy allows everyone to be their best at Ascendion.

• A typical day on Project involves building and improving AI-driven firmware security analysis pipelines that automatically discover vulnerabilities in third-party firmware.
• Engineers spend their time developing low-level tooling in C++, Python, and LLVM, transforming firmware source code into analyzable LLVM IR, creating compiler passes, generating and refining fuzzing harnesses, and improving automated vulnerability detection workflows.
• Daily work may include debugging firmware rehosting issues, investigating crashes discovered during fuzzing campaigns, reducing false positives in security findings, and enhancing LLM-based systems that classify firmware functionality and generate analysis artifacts.
• Team members collaborate closely with security researchers, compiler engineers, and project leadership to review architecture, prioritize new capabilities, and validate analysis results across diverse firmware targets.
• As the project moves toward open-source release, engineers also contribute to code quality improvements, CI/CD automation, testing, documentation, dependency reviews, developer onboarding experiences, and release-readiness activities, helping transform advanced security research into a production-grade platform that can be used and extended by the broader security community.

• Build and Enhance Security Analysis Pipelines
• Develop preprocessing pipelines that compile C/C++ firmware code into LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR).
• Implement and maintain LLVM-based transformations to make firmware suitable for off-target analysis and fuzzing.
• Create and improve code-analysis workflows, including call-graph extraction, metadata generation, and static-analysis integrations.
• Design and maintain systems that generate and execute fuzzing campaigns using modern fuzzing frameworks and AI-assisted techniques.
• Improve crash triage systems that automatically identify, deduplicate, and analyze security findings.
• Develop automated mechanisms to classify code semantics and improve analysis accuracy.

• Build scalable automation that combines compiler infrastructure, security tooling, and AI-driven workflows.
• Enhance vulnerability detection pipelines and help reduce false positives through improved analysis techniques.
• Improve reporting systems that transform raw security findings into actionable engineering insights.
• Validate analysis approaches across multiple firmware targets and environments.

• Improve system reliability, modularity, test coverage, and CI/CD automation.
• Create developer documentation, onboarding guides, and architectural references.
• Support dependency review, reproducible builds, and general open-source readiness activities.
• Help establish contribution workflows, issue triage practices, and release processes for external contributors.
• Write clean,…