Vulnerability Researcher

Zealot (zealotlabs.com) builds AI systems that find zero-days, emulate target devices, and develop working exploits for U.S. defense and intelligence customers. We're backed by tier-1 U.S. venture firms and industry leaders, and our team includes alumni of Anthropic, xAI, NSA, USCYBERCOM, Anduril, Unit 8200, and the Mossad.

The role:

You'll design and build agent systems that autonomously perform vulnerability research against real targets — firmware, network stacks, mobile OSes, IoT. That means wiring emulation (QEMU, Unicorn, Qiling), instrumentation (Frida, DynamoRIO), fuzzing, and exploit primitives into tool interfaces LLMs can actually reason over, plus the eval infrastructure to know whether any of it is working. Benchmarks like AIxCC and CyberGym on one side, real customer targets on the other.

What we're looking for

• 2–3+ years across systems programming (C/C++, Rust) and ML infrastructure
• Comfort with binary analysis, memory corruption classes, and modern mitigations (ASLR, CFI, PAC, MTE)
• Hands-on work with agent harnesses — orchestration, tool-use, eval loops — in production or at benchmark scale
• Fluency with at least one emulation stack (QEMU, Unicorn, Qiling, PANDA, FirmAE)
• Strong RE / debugger chops (GDB, IDA or Ghidra) and the patience to use them

Nice to have

Unit 8200, 81, or 9900 background. Pwn-heavy CTF experience (DEF CON finals, PPP, DiceGang, Shellphish, Theori, Team Atlanta), public CVEs, conference talks, AIxCC / CGC participation, or kernel / baseband RE.

Read this part carefully

That list is what the fully-formed version of this role looks like. It's not a filter. If you're sharp, hungry, and funny, apply anyway — even if half the bullets read like a foreign language today. Tech can be learned. Spirit cannot. We've watched the right people pick up binary exploitation from scratch and outship ten-year veterans inside a year. Tell us what you've taught yourself recently and what you'd tear into first here.

Requirements

Onsite, working out of our Tel Aviv office. Eligible to work on programs supporting U.S. defense and intelligence customers — comfort with the security and clearance process that comes with that.

What we offer

Competitive cash, meaningful early equity, a mission that matters, and hard problems nobody has solved yet.