Head of Research

The role

We’re hiring our first Head of Research to lead and grow Bay’s research group and make it the reference point for how AI agents break and how to control them.

Today’s agents rarely live in one place. A desktop or browser client runs on the device, the model runs in the vendor’s cloud, and the work often happens in a remote VM or container. Your group will map that chain for every agent that matters: where actions execute, how commands travel, who is authenticated, and where Bay can observe or block.

You’ll lead the researchers already on the team, help grow it, stay hands-on with the hardest problems, and work closely with Aner Morag (CPO), detection engineering and R&D. Every project should make Bay’s product better and produce something worth publishing.

What you’ll do

• Lead and grow the team: mentor the researchers already on board, take part in hiring new ones, and set how the group works, from target selection to evidence standards and disclosure.
• Own the research agenda across coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot), cloud and computer-use agents, browser agents and extensions, and MCP servers. Decide what to research, in what order, and when to stop.
• Stay hands-on: lead the deepest reverse engineering and vulnerability research yourself, across clients, runtimes and protocols on macOS, Windows and Linux.
• Turn research into product: partner with product and R&D on interception points, enforcement primitives and threat insight, and make sure findings ship in Bay.
• Run responsible disclosure for vulnerabilities such as sandbox and container escapes, cross-tenant access, credential exposure, prompt-injection-to-execution chains and tool or MCP abuse.
• Be Bay’s research voice: publish blogs, CVEs, talks and open-source tools, and represent Bay at conferences, with customers and with the security community.
• Build the research infrastructure, including tooling, labs and AI-assisted workflows (LLM-driven Frida, IDA or Ghidra over MCP), so a small team can move fast.
• Keep Bay ahead of the threat: track new agent releases, agentic attacks and malicious packages, skills and extensions in the wild, and red-team Bay’s own guardrails.

What we’re looking for

• A strong track record of original security research: vulnerabilities you found, disclosed or exploited (CVEs, bug bounty, vendor or red-team research). Usually 8+ years, but we care more about what you found than how long it took.
• Experience leading researchers: you’ve hired, mentored or led a research team or group, and raised the quality of other people’s work.
• Deep hands-on skills in reverse engineering (IDA, Ghidra, Binary Ninja or similar), dynamic instrumentation (Frida or similar), traffic interception and protocol analysis, including stripped binaries, certificate pinning and custom transports.
• Strong OS internals: processes, IPC, sandboxing (namespaces, seccomp, micro-VMs) and networking. macOS is a plus.
• Strong coding in Python plus at least one of TypeScript/JavaScript, Go, Rust or C/C++.
• Product sense: you can turn a finding into something a product team can build, and you know which research moves the business.
• Clear communication with engineers, executives, customers and the research community, in writing and on stage.
• Fluency with AI agents as research tools, and the judgment to check what they tell you.
• Evidence discipline: you keep what you observed and reproduced separate from what you inferred, and you hold the team to the same standard.

Nice to have

• Research on LLM or AI security, prompt injection, agent sandboxes or software supply chain.
• Cloud and container security: Kubernetes, container runtimes, cloud identity.
• A public research profile: published research, conference talks (Black Hat, DEF CON, OffensiveCon or similar) or well-known open-source tools.
• Experience building a research function at a startup or leading research at a security vendor.
• Experience from a technology or intelligence unit (8200, 81, Mamram, Sapir or similar).
• Exposure to detection engineering or threat hunting.
• B.Sc. in Computer Science, Mathematics or a related field.

Why join Bay

• Build Bay’s research group and set its agenda from the start, in a category that is still being defined.
• Your findings ship in the product, with enterprise customers including Micron Technology, Peloton and ClickUp already live.
• Work with the founders and a senior team that has built and scaled security companies before.
• Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a well-funded, Series A stage company.

Location

Tel Aviv

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Bay is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of every background and don’t discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or veteran status.

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