AI Red Team Researcher
- Compensation
- $155K–$185K / yr
- Location
- New York City
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- C level
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 4+ years
- Category
- Security
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 4+ years of experience in offensive security, adversarial ML, AI red teaming, or ML engineering with a strong adversarial focus.
- Hands-on experience generating synthetic media — voice cloning and TTS, face swap, lip-sync, diffusion-based image and video tools — in an offensive or research context, not just reading about it.
- Strong Python skills and practical ML fluency (PyTorch or similar): you can build attack tooling, automate testing pipelines, and reason about why a model fails, not just that it did.
- Working knowledge of adversarial ML techniques — evasion, adversarial perturbations, compression and post-processing attacks, data poisoning — and how to measure model robustness.
- Clear communicator who can turn technical findings into prioritized, actionable guidance for engineers and non-technical audiences alike, and who thrives with ambiguity and minimal supervision.
- Background in media forensics, signal processing, speech/audio, or computer vision. (nice to have)
- Traditional red team or penetration testing experience (cloud, APIs, web), relevant certifications (e.g., OSCP), or familiarity with AI security tooling such as Garak, PyRIT, or the Adversarial Robust
- Published research, conference talks, CVEs, or open-source contributions in adversarial ML, deepfakes, or AI security. (nice to have)
Full description
Who we are.
Reality Defender is an award-winning cybersecurity company helping enterprises and governments detect deepfakes and AI-generated media. Utilizing a patented multi-model approach, Reality Defender is robust against the bleeding edge of generative platforms producing video, audio, imagery, and text media. Reality Defender's API-first deepfake detection platform empowers teams and developers alike to identify fraud, disinformation campaigns, and harmful deepfakes in real time.
Backed by world class investors including DCVC, Illuminate Financial, Y Combinator, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Accenture, Rackhouse, and Argon VC, Reality Defender works with leading enterprise clients, financial institutions, and governments in order to ensure AI-generated media is not used for malicious purposes.
Youtube: Reality Defender Wins RSA Most Innovative Startup
The Red Team Role
Reality Defender's AI Red Team exists to break our own detection models before adversaries do. As a Red Team Researcher, you'll get your hands on the newest deepfake tools the moment they appear — voice clones, real-time face swaps, injection attacks, multimodal impersonations — use them the way real attackers would, and turn every failure you uncover into a measurable fix shipped alongside our AI and Data teams. This is a full-time role based at our NYC headquarters or remote within the U.S., reporting to VP of Product. Responsibilities include:
- Run continuous adversarial testing against our detection models across audio, video, image, and text, reproducing new generative tools and techniques as they're released and stress-testing them against production models.
- Build realistic, end-to-end attack simulations that mirror how bad actors actually operate — cloned voices in call centers, real-time synthetic video in onboarding flows and job interviews, virtual camera and media injection, and coordinated cross-channel impersonation.
- Build and maintain repeatable red team infrastructure: test harnesses, attack catalogs, and an evolving adversarial dataset that every model release is validated against.
- Close the loop on findings — prioritize them, hand them to AI scientists and engineers with clean reproduction steps, and verify fixes through regression testing so they stick.
- Track the generative AI landscape (open-source models, commercial tools, research papers, and threat actor tradecraft) and triage which techniques are most likely to be weaponized next.
- Partner with Product to shape roadmap priorities based on what red team findings reveal.
- Support Sales, Marketing, and Solutions Engineering with credible, publishable research and threat briefings for enterprise and government customers.