GenAI Security - Principal Security Research Engineer

Elastic is a search AI company providing cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability. The Principal Security Research Engineer will shape Elastic Security’s detection capabilities through GenAI security testing, threat research, detection engineering, and AI-assisted workflows. The role also involves presenting findings and improving protections against emerging attack methods.

Responsibilities:

• Design and carry out security tests for GenAI applications, agentic systems, and LLM-backed products. These tests will check for various attack types. They include prompt injection, indirect injection, retrieval poisoning, tool misuse, sensitive data extraction, and unsafe delegation to with the core purpose of building security protections
• Investigate new multi-domain threat vectors and attack methodologies to stay ahead of emerging risks and translating these into new security protections (e.g. detection rules)
• Create and present findings to enhance team knowledge and community awareness
• Apply AI-assisted techniques to expand coverage and accelerate validation. This may include developing new capabilities and Elastic AI workflows to streamline our threat research and detection engineering processes

Requirements:

• You should have experience working with endpoint data and understand detection engineering GenAI pitfalls working with existing telemetry
• You should have hands-on experience using LLM tools for security testing, research, or daily tasks. You need to understand how LLMs work. This includes context windows, tool use, RAG, and agentic chaining
• You should have experience using AI-assisted development tools and modern AI/ML frameworks
• Proven ability to seamlessly transition between different projects, codebases, or scrum teams based on dynamic business priorities
• You work autonomously and can drive decisions and results in a distributed team by leveraging asynchronous, direct, and transparent communication
• Previous successes in presenting findings and insights to technical audiences
• Experience running penetration tests or vulnerability assessments on web applications, or APIs. Experience as a Red Team operator is also valuable. You should understand the OWASP Top 10 and have some exposure to the OWASP LLM Top 10 or MITRE ATLAS. Additionally, you need to be able to triage findings. You should communicate risks clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Knowledge of AI testing tools or frameworks, such as Garak, PyRIT, PromptBench, Inspect AI, or similar (including personal research or experiments) is a plus
• Experience with Elastic Security Solution and proficiency in writing or validating detections using a query language (e.g. EQL, KQL, ESQL) is a bonus