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An overview of the role

We are seeking a Staff Security Research Engineer to join our Application Security Team to conduct cutting-edge security research on GitLab's AI-powered DevSecOps capabilities. As GitLab transforms software development through intelligent collaboration between developers and specialized AI agents, we need security researchers who can proactively identify and validate vulnerabilities before they impact our platform or customers.

In this role, you'll be at the forefront of security research, working with our GitLab DevSecOps platform, Duo Agent Platform, GitLab Duo Chat, and AI workflows that represent the future of human/AI collaborative development. You'll develop novel testing methodologies (including for AI agent security), conduct hands-on penetration testing, and translate emerging threats into actionable security improvements. Your research will directly influence how we build and secure the next generation of AI-powered DevSecOps tools, ensuring GitLab remains the most secure software factory platform on the market.

This position offers the unique opportunity to help shape security and AI security practices in one of the world's largest DevSecOps platforms, working with engineering teams who are pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI-assisted software development. You'll have access to cutting-edge AI systems and the freedom to explore creative attack scenarios while contributing to the security of millions of developers worldwide.

This role reports to the Senior Manager of Application Security 

What you'll do: 

• Conduct security research in two or more specialty areas.
• Identify novel, systemic, and chained vulnerabilities in GitLab, where individual weaknesses combine for outsized impact.
• Validate security vulnerabilities through hands-on testing, developing proof-of-concept exploits that demonstrate real-world attack scenarios.
• Assess emerging industry vulnerability classes against the GitLab codebase in your areas of expertise, and drive remediation of the class rather than the instance.
• Conduct security research into GitLab's AI and agentic surfaces, and participate in defining the security requirements that engineering teams build against.
• Build the tooling and automation that scales security research, including agent-assisted vulnerability discovery across our codebase.
• Research the security posture of open source tools and dependencies integrated with GitLab, report findings to their maintainers, and track mitigation following our responsible disclosure guidelines.
• Solve technical problems of high scope, complexity, and ambiguity.
• Define and implement security technical and process improvements.
• Contribute to the team roadmap.
• Provide actionable and constructive feedback to the engineering teams that need to act on your findings.
• Mentor and advise other individual contributors within the team, and sometimes outside of it.
• Share knowledge and novel vulnerability types with the security community.

What you'll bring

• 7+ years of experience in security research, penetration testing, or offensive security roles
• Hands-on experience discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities.
• Be a subject matter expert (SME) of at least two technical areas impacting the security of the product.
• Proficiency in one or more of Ruby, Go, Python, TypeScript, or Rust. Experience in AI frameworks is an asset.
• Ability to read and analyze code across multiple languages and codebases.
• Understanding of AI attack vectors including prompt injection, agent manipulation, and workflow exploitation
• Experience leading technical objectives in cross-functional teams
• Excellent written communication skills with an ability to articulate complex topics in a clear and concise manner.
• Ability to translate complex technical findings into clear risk assessments and remediation recommendations
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with creative thinking about attack scenarios
• Nice to have: Published security research or conference presentations; Background in software engineering with distributed systems expertise; Security certifications such as OSCP, OSCE, GPEN, or similar; Experience with GitLab or similar DevSecOps platforms

About the team

Security Researchers are a part of our Application Security team, who address complex security challenges facing GitLab and its customers to enable GitLab to be the most secure software factory platform on the market. We focus on systemic product security risks and work cross-functionally to mitigate them while maintaining Engineering's development velocity.