Offensive AI Researcher, X-Force Adversary Services

  • New York

    San Francisco

    Chicago

    Houston

    Dallas

  • Consulting
  • Professional

Offensive AI Researcher, X-Force Adversary Services

  • New York

    San Francisco

    Chicago

    Houston

    Dallas

  • Consulting
  • Professional

Introduction
At IBM, work is more than a job – it’s a calling: To build. To design. To code. To consult. To think along with clients and sell. To make markets. To invent. To collaborate. Not just to do something better, but to attempt things you’ve never thought possible. Are you ready to lead in this new era of technology and solve some of the world’s most challenging problems? If so, lets talk.

Your Role and Responsibilities
At IBM, we help defenders continuously assess their real-world security. Our Adversary Services offering provides an experience designed to mirror today’s advanced adversaries, not yesterday’s threats. We partner with security teams to help them understand the art of the possible by delivering an unrivaled attack experience, at scale.

As an Offensive AI Researcher & Tester within IBM’s X-Force Adversary Services team you’ll both test AI systems as well as leverage AI with cutting-edge X-Force methodologies and sophisticated capabilities to keep X-Force on the bleeding edge of red teaming innovation. You’ll be responsible for inventing clever ways of utilizing AI for breaching customer networks and bypassing security controls, while working side by side with our offensive engineers, researchers, and developers to drive those innovations throughout our toolset and across our customers.

Simulating sophisticated threat actors takes industry leading offensive research, advanced capabilities, and mature methodology. We believe offensive AI research is essential for both simulating various sophistication levels of threat actors and enabling defenders to better understand, defend, and respond to attacks. IBM’s X-Force Adversary Services team is considered one of the top teams in the industry because we leverage Continuous Capability Development and Delivery (C2D2) to drive research, new tools, and develop mature Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs) and to ensure all operators are delivering red team exercises to the highest technical standards. We leverage automation and AI in targeting, tasking, and analysis to free up our human operators to solve the more interesting challenges for hacking the world’s largest banks, defense contractors, and critical industries.

We are looking for individuals that are driven, proactive, thorough, and forward looking, and most of all, know what’s needed to be part of an effective team.

Responsibilities of the Role:
• Solving problems that do not have known solutions
• Help develop methodologies for offensive AI design, implementation, and testing
• Help develop offensive AI tooling and frameworks
• Help develop and prototype novel AI capabilities and techniques
• Researching threats, vulnerabilities, and exploit techniques within AI technologies
• Incorporate feedback loops with peers on AI research and tooling
• Provide guidance and offense-related insights throughout IBM on AI technologies

HHM24


Required Technical and Professional Expertise
Experience attacking AI systems:

  • Experience with Model Evasion, Extraction, Inversion, Poisoning attacks as well as LLM Prompt Injection
  • Attacking RAG interfaces, deployment orchestrators, and integrations with associated XaaS platform infrastructure
  • Application security testing experience

Offensive use of AI agents and workflows:

  • Experience evaluating AI models and creating test harnesses for offensive use
  • Experience with iterative multi-stage offensive tasking and targeting workflows leveraging DAG or similar
  • Demonstrated experience using and creating offensive agents which support shifting towards a Human-on-the-Loop approach for offensive tasks that are good candidates for automation
  • 5+ years of adversary tradecraft industry experience
  • Experience with training, testing, and optimizing machine learning models using frameworks such as Optuna or otherwise

Development experience:

  • 5+ years coding in two or more programming languages (Python, C#, C/C++, Assembly, Rust)
  • Knowledgeable of the phases of software development, from gathering requirements to deployment (SDLC)
  • Experience with enterprise data lakes, relational/vector databases, complex data structures and data analysis tools, offensive data schema development and format conversations
  • Proficient in debugging (gdb, WinDbg)
  • Binary analysis using a reverse engineering platform like IDA, Ghidra, or Binary Ninja
  • Experience using and validating AI-as-a-Service platforms such as with AI platforms such as Amazon SageMaker, Azure ML, BigML, Watsonx.ai
  • Knowledgeable of Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines that automate testing and deployment (Azure DevOps, TeamCity, Jenkins)
  • Knowledgeable of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) (Terraform, Ansible)
  • Knowledgeable of scalable system design and architecture
  • Knowledgeable of version control systems, such as Git


Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

  • BA/BS in an Infosec related major or commensurate practical experience
  • History of developing open-source software for the security community
  • History of presenting at security conferences
  • Experience with Adversarial Robustness Toolbox, TextAttack, Augly, etc.
  • Track record in vulnerability research and CVE assignments related adversarial ML
  • Experience performing Adversary Simulation engagements against hardened and restricted environments
  • Experience supporting Red Team Operators through development of tooling
  • Knowledge of Windows internals
  • Knowledge of EDR detection capabilities and associated evasion techniques for behavioral based alerting
  • Experience with network protocols and packet capture
  • Demonstrated exploit, payload, or attack framework development experience
  • Knowledge of Linux internals, Active Directory, Mac, Windows workstations and servers
  • Relevant certifications from organizations like Offensive Security’s OSCE, SANS’ GXPN, or CREST’s CSAT/CSAM or demonstrable equivalent skills
  • Prior security consulting experience

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About Business Unit

IBM Consulting is IBM’s consulting and global professional services business, with market leading capabilities in business and technology transformation. With deep expertise in many industries, we offer strategy, experience, technology, and operations services to many of the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Our people are focused on accelerating our clients’ businesses through the power of collaboration. We believe in the power of technology responsibly used to help people, partners and the planet.


Your Life @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?


About IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 50 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.


Location Statement

IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:

– Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being
– Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs.
– Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employ