AI Security Research & Red Team Engineer

About Us At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers millions of websites and other Internet properties for customers ranging from individual bloggers to SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. Cloudflare protects and accelerates any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare all have web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. At Cloudflare, we’re not looking for people who wait for a polished roadmap; we’re looking for the builders who see the cracks in the Internet that everyone else has simply learned to live with. We value candidates who have the instinct to spot a "normalized" problem and the AI-native curiosity to create a solution using the latest tools. Our culture is built on iteration, leveraging AI to ship faster today to make it better tomorrow, while ensuring that every improvement, no matter how small, is shared across the team to lift everyone up. If you’re the type of person who values curiosity over bureaucracy, and that AI is a partner in solving tough problems to keep the Internet moving forward, you’ll fit right in. The Role: We are seeking a highly skilled AI Security Research & Red team engineer to join our Red Team within the Security Threat Detection, Response and Emulation organization. This is a critical role that will be at the forefront of protecting our company and customers from malicious threats. You will be responsible for driving security research, exercises, and activities that emulate real world attackers and attacks to drive improvements in Cloudflare’s security posture focusing on AI, Agents, harnesses and LLM’s. Key Responsibilities: • AI Security and Vulnerability Research: Stay current with emerging threats and perform deep-dive research to identify AI-specific vulnerabilities and risks in addition to general vulnerabilities across Cloudflare’s products and services. • Agentic testing and adoption: As a core function, identifying AI-related attack surfaces through rigorous testing of agentic implementations and LLM usage which will help define requirements and implementation guidance while proactively. • Adversary Simulation: Execution of full-chain red team operations targeting Cloudflare’s global infrastructure, corporate networks, and product ecosystems. • Efficacy Testing: Establish a rigorous framework for testing "Security Efficacy"—measuring exactly how well our WAF, EDR, and SIEM detections perform against known TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures). • Purple Teaming: Foster a highly collaborative relationship with the Blue Team (Detection & Response) to ensure findings are translated into immediate defensive improvements. • Mentorship & Growth: Be a technical leader, providing technical expertise while fostering a culture of curiosity, ethical hacking and partnering to improve Cloudflare’s security posture. • Executive Reporting: Translate complex technical exploits into risk-based narratives for leadership, helping prioritize engineering resources where they matter most. Partnerships • Security Incident Response Team (SIRT): You will act as the "sparring partner" for SIRT. By conducting unannounced exercises, you help them refine their playbooks, test their on-call rotations, and ensure their forensic tooling is effective under pressure. • Threat Detection & Threat Engineering: You will partner closely with these teams to bridge the gap between adversary simulation and defensive coverage. You will proactively identify detection gaps, lead the development of new detection logic, and establish rigorous validation frameworks to test and tune detections against emerging TTPs. • Product Engineering/SRE: We operate as "Customer Zero" of our own products, your red teaming findings will drive resilience in processes and implementations, ultimately making Cloudflare and its customers more secure. • Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC): You will bridge the gap between "paper security" and "technical reality." By providing empirical evidence of control effectiveness, you help GRC move away from manual audits and toward continuous, automated compliance validation. Required Qualifications: • Experience: 4+ years in offensive security, application security or other relevant field • Deep knowledge: AI, Coding agents, LLMs, prompt engineering, AI-related attack vectors (e.g., prompt injection, jailbreaking), and Agentic concepts all for use in the red team but also testing Cloudflare uses. • Technical Roots: A strong background in manual penetration testing, exploit development, or cloud security (AWS/GCP/Bare Metal). • Operational Mindset: Experience using the MITRE ATT&CK framework to map coverage and identify "blind spots" in defensive telemetry. • Communication Skills: The ability to explain a complex "0-day" exploit to a non-technical stakeholder while maintaining the respect of a deep-dive engineering team. • Tooling Familiarity: Knowledge of automated breach and attack simulation (BAS) tools, as well as custom-built frameworks for payload delivery and C2 infrastructure. Compensation Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. • For New York based hires: Estimated annual salary of $166,000 - $208,000. Equity This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan. What Makes Cloudflare Special? We’re not just a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company. We’re a highly ambitious, large-scale technology company with a soul. Fundamental to our mission to help build a better Internet is protecting the f