Senior Forward Deployed Security Researcher

At Octane, we're building the agentic security layer for mission-critical source code and systems, finding + patching real, exploitable vulnerabilities.

What we're looking for

We're looking for a Senior Forward Deployed Security Researcher who can work directly with some of Octane's most important customers to solve difficult, real-world security problems and turn those learnings into better security agents.

This is a hands-on, high-agency role. You'll work closely with our founder, security research leadership, and ML team to adapt Octane to complex customer environments, develop new vulnerability detection strategies, and build state-of-the-art cyber intelligence.

You should be equally comfortable digging into an unfamiliar codebase, developing a proof of concept, refining an agent's investigation strategy, and explaining a finding to a customer's engineering or security team. We want someone who can earn technical trust, challenge assumptions, and own a problem through resolution.

We're looking for a strong background in VR, practical exploit development experience, and exceptional communication skills. You should understand how business logic, architecture, deployment conditions, and trust boundaries affect whether a vulnerability is actually exploitable.

You do not need to have held a forward deployed title before. We care more about the security problems you've solved, what you personally owned, and the results you delivered.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with priority customers to understand their architecture, threat model, security requirements, and most important attack surfaces.
• Adapt and refine Octane's security agents for complex environments. Identify missing context, improve investigation strategies, and make findings more accurate and useful.
• Develop new vulnerability detection strategies based on customer needs, emerging attack patterns, and gaps in existing security tooling.
• Investigate and validate findings through code analysis, testing, and proof-of-concept development. Establish exploitability, prerequisites, and impact.
• Explain findings clearly to engineering and security teams. Help customers reproduce issues, evaluate severity, and identify practical remediation.
• Own the technical work across customer engagements, from scoping and onboarding through analysis, findings review, and follow-up.
• Work closely with our ML and engineering teams to turn customer-specific learnings into reusable improvements to our agents, tooling, and evaluation methods.
• Diagnose false positives. Identify their underlying causes and improve the context, tools, or reasoning needed to address them.
• Build scripts, integrations, and research tools that make investigations faster and customer workflows more effective.
• Maintain a high bar for evidence and technical credibility. Success means validated severe findings, customer trust, and measurable improvements in Octane's capabilities.

Qualifications