About Soket AI
Soket is an AI research firm headquartered in Bengaluru with a mission to build efficient and generalized intelligence for humanity. We are focused on advancing frontier AI research through the development of large-scale foundation models in math, code and reasoning that are open, energy-efficient, multilingual, and responsible by design. Funded and supported by the IndiaAI Mission, Government of India. Our work places a strong emphasis on India and the Global South, where access to high-quality AI systems remains limited despite immense linguistic and cultural diversity.
At Soket, we believe the future of AI should be accessible, scalable, and aligned with real-world societal needs. Our teams work across large language models, multimodal systems, speech technologies, reasoning systems, and large-scale AI infrastructure, with a strong focus on open research and practical deployment. We are deeply passionate about pushing the boundaries of AI research while building systems that are useful, trustworthy, and globally impactful.
Workloads you would be involved in
- Work closely with the frontier team at Soket on a cybersecurity frontier model, acting as the in-house domain expert for offensive and defensive security capabilities.
- Define the capability taxonomy for agentic cybersecurity, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques, the cyber kill chain, and CWE/CVE classes.
- Curate high-signal datasets for pretraining and post-training: exploit write-ups, CVE advisories and patches, CTF solutions, pentest reports, IR playbooks, detection rules, and annotated tool traces.
- Design multi-step agentic workflows spanning recon, enumeration, exploitation, privilege escalation, lateral movement, persistence, and post-exploitation, as well as detection, triage, and incident response.
- Build reproducible attack and defence environments: vulnerable-by-design targets, AD labs, web/API/cloud/container misconfigurations, and network topologies for execution-grounded training and evaluation.
- Design isolation and sandboxing for safe agent execution using containers, microVMs, namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, and network egress controls, so offensive tooling can run without leaving the box.
- Build evals and benchmarks for cyber capability: CTF-style tasks, vulnerability discovery and exploitation, patch generation, malware triage, log analysis, and detection engineering, with verifiable, programmatic graders.
- Define reward signals and verification checks for RL on cyber tasks, such as flag capture, PoC reproduction, exploit success, patch validation, and rule-hit accuracy.
- Review agent trajectories to separate genuine technique from lucky guesses or environment shortcuts, and feed failure modes back into targeted data interventions.
- Provide expert review for safety, dual-use risk, and responsible-use guardrails across datasets and evals.
- Mentor researchers and engineers on security fundamentals and translate real-world adversary tradecraft into training and evaluation specs.
You are a good fit if you:
- Have 3–4 years of hands-on experience in offensive security, defensive security, or both (red team, pentesting, vulnerability research, SOC/IR, detection engineering, or AppSec).
- Have working command of the Kali Linux toolchain and know how to chain tools into end-to-end attack workflows.
- Understand offensive and defensive cyber capabilities across network, web, API, binary, cloud, and Active Directory environments.
- Are strong in code analysis, covering manual source review, SAST/DAST, reverse engineering, and fuzzing, and can reason about root cause rather than just run scanners.
- Are comfortable with sandboxing and isolation primitives and understand how to contain untrusted code and offensive tooling.
- Write solid Python and Bash, and can read C/C++, Go, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Java when auditing code.
- Are curious about how LLM agents can be taught to do real security work, and enjoy turning expert intuition into structured datasets, rubrics, and evals.
- Hold a Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent practical proof of work.
You are a strong candidate if you have experience with:
- Offensive tooling: Nmap, Metasploit, Burp Suite, sqlmap, Hydra, John the Ripper, Hashcat, Impacket, Responder, BloodHound, Aircrack-ng, Nikto, Gobuster/ffuf, Cobalt Strike or Sliver-class C2.
- Binary analysis and RE: Ghidra, IDA, radare2, GDB (pwndbg/GEF), pwntools, ROP/heap exploitation, shellcode.
- Code analysis and vuln research: Semgrep, CodeQL, Bandit, AFL++, libFuzzer, Syzkaller, patch diffing, and root-cause analysis of CVEs.
- Defensive and detection stack: Wireshark, Zeek, Suricata, Wazuh, Velociraptor, Sigma, YARA, osquery, ELK/Splunk, memory and disk forensics (Volatility, Autopsy).
- Frameworks and standards: MITRE ATT&CK, CVE/CWE/CVSS, OWASP Top 10, NIST CSF, PTES/OSSTMM.
- Sandboxing and infra: Docker, Kubernetes, gVisor, Firecracker, nsjail, QEMU/KVM, Terraform, and container or cloud security (AWS/GCP/Azure IAM, K8s RBAC).
- Cyber evals and ranges: CTF experience (HackTheBox, TryHackMe, picoCTF, DEF CON/other CTFs), plus familiarity with Cybench, NYU CTF Bench, or CyberSecEval.
- Certifications (nice to have): OSCP, OSEP, OSCE, GPEN, GCIH, CRTO, or equivalent.
- Public proof of work: CVEs, bug bounty reports, CTF write-ups, open-source security tools, conference talks.
- Familiarity with LLM agents, tool use, or prompt/agent security is a plus, but not required.
Why work with Soket?
At Soket, you will get the chance to work on problems that only a handful of teams in the world are solving today - building frontier foundation models at scale. You will see first-hand how intelligence is baked into large models and work across the entire stack that powers modern AI systems. You will work with supercomputing-scale GPU clusters and tackle challenging problems in petabyte scale data aggregation and processing, distributed training, model architectures, infrastructure, inference optimization, and large-scale AI deployment.
One day you might be debugging CUDA kernels or NCCL issues, another day optimizing throughput for multi-GPU training runs, building new infrastructure tooling, or experimenting with ideas that make training faster and more efficient. We are a deeply research-driven and engineering-focused team that loves nerding out about systems, scaling laws, training stacks, and AI research. If you enjoy going deep into technical problems and learning from highly talented researchers and engineers, you will feel right at home here. Most importantly, we are building efficient, open, and accessible AI systems for India, the Global South, and ultimately for humanity as a whole.
If this sounds exciting to you, come build the future with us.
Apply Now!
Soket AI Labs is a research-first AI company headquartered in Bengaluru. We are an equal opportunity employer and strongly encourage applications from people of all genders, backgrounds, and ethnicities. We offer competitive compensation, equity participation opportunities, flexible work arrangements across office and remote settings, comprehensive leave policies including parental and wellness leaves, and regular team offsites designed to foster collaboration and innovation.
As an AI-native organization, we use AI systems as part of our candidate assessment and interview processes. Please make sure your resume aligns with the job description. More details about how candidate data is processed and used will be available on the application page.