Cybersecurity Research Engineer – AI Security & Agentic AI
Location: North York, Ontario, Canada | Duration: 1 Year with Potential for Extension | Work Model: Hybrid
About the Role
Our consulting client is seeking a Technical Security Research Engineer to research, prototype, evaluate, and operationalize emerging cybersecurity capabilities. This is a hands-on, research-oriented opportunity for candidates who can translate research hypotheses into working code, proof-of-concepts (POCs), product evaluations, and enterprise recommendations.
This opportunity is open to experienced professionals, recent graduates, interns, and candidates with relevant academic research or publications in cybersecurity. Candidates with a Master's degree from a recognized Canadian university and experience in academic research, market research, or emerging technology evaluation are particularly encouraged.
The ideal candidate combines the mindset of a security researcher, software engineer, and emerging-technology evaluator, with a strong interest in building practical cybersecurity capabilities.
Responsibilities
- Build agentic AI security harnesses, prototypes, and POCs for new cyber capabilities.
- Research AI Security, Agentic AI, Application Security, quantum/PQC, blockchain, and other emerging technologies.
- Develop and integrate agents, LLMs, APIs, security tools, automation, and test environments.
- Evaluate new cybersecurity products and startups through hands-on testing, benchmarking, and technical due diligence.
- Validate vendor claims and assess security, scalability, integration complexity, and enterprise applicability.
- Help transition successful research prototypes toward operational use.
- Present technical findings and recommendations to engineering, security leadership, and investment stakeholders.
Required Skills / What You Bring
- Master's degree in Cybersecurity, Computer Science, AI, Computer Engineering, or a related field; PhD welcomed.
- Strong hands-on software development skills, particularly in Python, with experience in Java, Node.js, Go, C/C++, and additional modern programming languages.
- Experience with LLMs, AI agents, tool calling, orchestration frameworks, APIs, cloud, containers, and security automation.
- Strong knowledge of Application Security, AI Security, vulnerability research, threat modeling, secure development, Network Security, Infrastructure Security, Security Architecture, and other security domains.
- Demonstrated ability to design experiments, build prototypes, and evaluate emerging technologies.
- Strong technical writing and presentation skills.
Highly Valued Qualifications
- Research papers or presentations at recognized cybersecurity, AI, or systems forums.
- Experience with AI red teaming, autonomous penetration testing, agent security, or AI-native security tooling.
- Cybersecurity startup, founder, or early-stage product experience.
- Experience pitching to venture capital, corporate venture teams, accelerators, or investment stakeholders.
- Patents, open-source security projects, vulnerability research, or other demonstrated technical innovation.
- Certifications such as CISSP, OSCP, CSSLP, or equivalent.
Ideal Candidate
The ideal candidate combines the mindset of a security researcher, software engineer, and emerging-technology evaluator and is comfortable turning new ideas into measurable, working cybersecurity capabilities.
Candidates with academic cybersecurity research, published papers, research projects, or market research experience related to emerging security technologies are strongly encouraged to be considered.
