Threat Research Engineer, Security Factory: Threat Research

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An overview of this role

As a Threat Research Engineer, you’ll take ideas from the first question to a working proof of concept, deploy it, and analyze the results yourself. This is a full-stack role, with AI central to how we work. You’ll build agentic workflows for research, analysis, and detection, and use AI tools every day to move faster.

What you’ll do

• Research new attack surfaces and threat vectors, including AI coding agents, agent plugins, and package ecosystems.
• Find and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in open source projects and developer tools.
• Analyze software supply chain incidents and events.
• Build AI-powered workflows and agents that automate research, analysis, and detection.
• Build and maintain the cloud-based systems behind our detection and advisory work.
• Improve the quality and coverage of our vulnerability and malware advisories.
• Write up your findings as blog posts and present them at conferences.
• Take part in on-call or operational support where your team's ownership model requires it.

What you’ll bring

• Hands-on security experience in research, malware analysis, penetration testing, or security tooling, with both a developer mindset and an adversarial mindset: you can build systems and think about how to break them.
• Demonstrated experience using AI in real work, such as building with large language model APIs or agent frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, or agent SDKs.
• Strong programming skills in Go or Python, with good software engineering practices including testing, code review, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and maintainable code.
• Experience deploying and running production services on a public cloud.
• Understanding of how package ecosystems work and how software supply chain attacks happen.
• Ability to map possible attack vectors, name trade-offs, and make data-driven decisions, balancing quality and speed with customer outcomes in mind while keeping up with security and AI industry trends.
• Clear writing that explains findings to both engineers and a general audience.
• Helpful, but not required: published vulnerability findings; security research on AI agents, large language model applications, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers; Google Cloud Platform experience; or infrastructure as code experience with Terraform or OpenTofu.

You don’t need deep knowledge of compilers or static application security testing engines. A high-level understanding is enough.

About the team

The Threat Research group researches security threats as they emerge and turns what we learn into protection for GitLab customers. We maintain the GitLab Advisory Database, which powers GitLab’s dependency scanning. We also build detection capabilities, do original vulnerability research, and publish what we find. Recent work includes the Shai-Hulud npm worm and a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Serena, a popular MCP coding agent. You can read more on the Security Labs blog .

The base salary range for this role’s listed level is currently for residents of the EU, applicable in the specified country or countries only. Sales roles are also eligible for incentive pay targeted at up to 100% of the offered base salary. Grade level and salary ranges are determined through interviews and a review of education, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant, equity with other team members, alignment with market data, and geographic location and having regard to any applicable collective agreements. The base salary range does not include bonuses, equity, or benefits.

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