Agentic AI Security Engineer

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)

Confirmed live today High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
Ashburn, VA
Salary
$149,084–$186,356 / yr
Employment
Full-time
Posted
3 days ago
Freshness
Confirmed live today

Market check

Salary context

Competitive pay

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $185k
This role $168k
$121k most similar roles pay here $236k

This role pays less than 56% of similar roles. Most pay $151,475–$218,000 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $168k versus about $185k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is one of the largest private biomedical research organizations in the world, funding basic research and science education to advance human health and knowledge. Industry: Biomedical Research & Science Education

Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) currently has 2 open roles on FindRole.

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At a glance

TL;DR · Agentic AI Security Engineer

As an Agentic AI Security Engineer at Janelia, you will join the AI team to develop and operate a comprehensive safety stack for agentic AI systems. You will be responsible for building sandboxing solutions using kernel- and VM-level isolation on OpenShift platforms and HPC clusters, implementing guardrails through policy enforcement and judge models, and establishing observability via audit logging and real-time monitoring. The role focuses on securing shared research infrastructure against risks like hallucinated commands and sandbox escapes when AI agents execute code or control instruments. You will work with Linux, Kubernetes, and tool-calling protocols like MCP while managing both self-hosted open-weight models and frontier commercial models. This position addresses the critical challenge of ensuring safety for autonomous tools operating at machine speed within a complex scientific research environment involving biology, physics, and machine learning.

What you'll do

  • Develop and maintain hardened execution environments for agent code using kernel and VM-level isolation.
  • Implement network egress controls and sandbox security on OpenShift platforms and HPC clusters.
  • Build guardrails to enforce policies on agent inputs, outputs, and tool calls.
  • Deploy judge models and human approval gates to manage agentic behavior.
  • Create independent safeguard services for routing and monitoring agent sessions.
  • Establish systems for attributable audit logging and real-time monitoring of agent activities.
  • Perform post-incident analysis and conduct adversarial testing on the safety stack.
  • Make foundational architecture decisions for the security infrastructure of AI agents.

What we're looking for

  • Minimum 5 years of experience in security, systems/SRE, or ML systems engineering.
  • Hands-on experience operating LLM agents and managing their failures.
  • Deep expertise in sandbox or container security with the ability to apply it to agentic domains.
  • Proficiency in Linux and Kubernetes/OpenShift isolation techniques.
  • Working knowledge of agent architectures including tool-calling protocols, approval gates, judge models, and guardrail frameworks.
  • Evidence of technical contributions through open-source projects, publications, technical writing, or production systems.

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