Applied Methods
~The MetaSecurityOffensive Security & Red Team

Offensive Security & Red Team

Engineers in this role execute offensive security assessments and red team operations across AI company infrastructure, applications, and—critically—AI-specific attack surfaces including prompt injection, model exfiltration, agent abuse, and tool-use exploitation. They combine hands-on penetration testing and adversarial simulation with custom tooling development, performing both rapid, targeted engagements and comprehensive open-scope operations that validate detection and response capabilities end-to-end. What sets this work apart is the focus on emerging AI risks: engineers assess production language models, agentic systems, and ML pipelines alongside traditional cloud, Kubernetes, and endpoint surfaces. They sit within the security function, partnering closely with defensive teams and product engineering to identify vulnerabilities early in design, then translate findings into actionable risk narratives that drive remediation and inform broader security strategy.

$ titles --canonical
Offensive Security EngineerSecurity Lead, Agentic Red Team
Open Jobs8
Companies Hiring6
$ expectations --role offensive-security-&-red-team

Measured across 8 of 8 open postings.

75%
expect AI in the role's own work
25% state it as a requirement
0%
work directly with customers
13%
manage people
Mid
most common level
50% of open postings
WHAT THEY ASK FOR, VERBATIM

“Design and run rigorous evaluations of model cyber capabilities and safeguards”

OpenAI · Red Team Specialist - Cyber

“developing agentic offensive security tooling: LLM-driven systems that encode operator tradecraft”

Palantir · Offensive Security Engineer

“Research and implement novel testing approaches for emerging capabilities, including agent systems, tool use, and new interaction paradigms”

Anthropic · Red Team Engineer, Safeguards

“Assess AI/ML-specific attack surfaces including prompt injection, model exfiltration, agent abuse, tool-use exploitation, and MCP security boundaries”

Perplexity · Member of Technical Staff (Offensive Security Engineer)
$02

Skills

What companies are looking for in this role.

$ skills --core

Offensive security testing

100%

Threat modeling and architecture review

88%

Security engineering

75%

Cloud and infrastructure security

38%

Incident response and forensics

25%

Detection engineering

25%

Security tooling and automation engineering

25%
$ skills --emerging

AI red teaming and safety testing

75%

Agentic system research

38%

AI safety and guardrails

38%

AI risk and safety evaluation

25%

AI evaluation design

25%
$03

Technology

The tools and technologies that define this role.

$ tech --language
Gomoderate
Pythonmoderate
$ tech --platform
Kubernetesmoderate
$ tech --concept
AI agentshigh