Sr. AI Threat Researcher

What You Will Do

Research & Analysis

Investigate how threat actors are leveraging AI across the attack lifecycle, including: AI assisted social engineering, AI-generated malware, automated reconnaissance, and adversarial attacks against ML-based defenses.

Research real-world threats to agentic AI systems, AI supply chains, and enterprise AI deployments, assessing risk and developing detection strategies.

Help instrument and tune telemetry to identify indicators of AI-driven attacker behavior at scale.

Analyze global telemetry, case data, and OSINT to surface emerging AI-related threat trends and early-warning indicators.

Automation & Efficiency

As a practitioner of the technology you research, identify opportunities to automate repetitive research and reporting workflows using LLMs, scripting, and internal tooling.

Help the team evolve its operating model as new AI capabilities become available.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Work closely with CTU researchers, SophosLabs analysts, MDR threat hunters, data

scientists, and engineering teams to synthesize findings into unique reporting with actionable intelligence.

Contribute to the joint task-force intelligence cycle, ensuring insights flow rapidly into protections, detection rules, and operational systems.

Content & Publication

Produce high-quality written intelligence outputs, including deep-dive research, rapid

analyses, and strategic forecasting.

Author work that is suitable for external publication via Sophos blogs, industry reports,

and conference presentations.

Present findings to internal stakeholders, external partners, and the broader security

community.

What You Will Bring

Required Qualifications

Ability to interpret data from diverse telemetry sources and transform it into actionable

intelligence.

Exceptional written communication skills suitable for both technical and executive

audiences.

Demonstrated experience in at least two of the following: threat intelligence, malware analysis, detection engineering, or AI/ML research.

Strong knowledge of threat actor ecosystems, modern attack techniques, and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

Hands-on proficiency with Python and modern AI development patterns, including building and orchestrating multi-agent systems, working with LLM APIs, and designing agentic workflows with sub-agents, tool use, and retrieval-augmented generation.

Experience building or using automation tools to streamline analytical or reporting

workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience working in MDR, incident response, or real-time security operations environments.

Prior authorship of externally published threat research (blogs, reports, conference presentations).

Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, or building AI-assisted analytical tools.

Familiarity with large-scale telemetry pipelines, security data lakes, or SIEM/SOAR platforms.