Introduction
At IBM, work is more than a job - it's a calling: To build. To design. To code. To consult. To think along with clients and sell. To make markets. To invent. To collaborate. Not just to do something better, but to attempt things you've never thought possible. Are you ready to lead in this new era of technology and solve some of the world's most challenging problems? If so, lets talk.
Your Role and Responsibilities
As Head of AI Security Testing, you’ll be responsible for conducting applied research to develop novel ways to manipulate and breach AI systems, focused on meaningful impacts to safety and security. Joining a team of hackers, you’ll lead the AI security testing practice, helping to develop cutting-edge testing methodology and tooling for performing testing of GenAI applications, integrations, and API endpoints for security issues.
Taking a wider view of AI Red Teaming, you’ll lead or contribute to existing research for attacking the end-to-end AI ecosystem, targeting MLSecops platforms, assessing ML models for safety and security issues, attacking AI-as-a-Service platforms, and perform testing of GenAI applications, integrations, and API endpoints for security issues before production. You’ll help expand our existing internal AI training initiatives and provide select training to our wider team of hackers to ensure they keep ahead of technology advancements to effectively assess AI systems.
As the face of AI Red Teaming and AI security thought leadership in IBM X-Force, you will discuss strategies for securing and defending AI systems with key customers, while enabling other technical team members to have customer conversations on your behalf. Working with product offering management, you’ll help to refine our AI security offerings to balance manual and automated testing within MLSecOps. You will collaborate closely with our X-Force Offensive Research (XOR), X-Force Adversary Services, and X-Force Red teams to conduct practical research focused on real-world customer impact, leading research on attacking GenAI and identifying novel ways to achieve malicious code execution, unauthorized actions, and data theft. You’ll also collaborate with other IBM AI-focused teams including watsonx and IBM Research.
Simulating sophisticated threat actors takes industry leading offensive research, advanced capabilities, and mature methodology. We believe offensive AI research is essential for both simulating various sophistication levels of threat actors and enabling defenders to better understand, defend, and respond to attacks. IBM’s X-Force Adversary Services team is considered one of the top teams in the industry because we leverage Continuous Capability Development and Delivery (C2D2) to drive research, new tools, and develop mature Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs) and to ensure all operators are delivering red team exercises to the highest technical standards. We leverage automation and AI in targeting, tasking, and analysis to free up our human operators to solve the more interesting challenges for hacking the world’s largest banks, defense contractors, and critical industries.
We are looking for individuals that are driven, proactive, thorough, and forward looking, and most of all, know what’s needed to be part of an effective team.
Responsibilities Of The Role
- Solving problems that do not have known solutions
- Help develop methodologies for offensive AI design, implementation, and testing
- Help develop offensive AI tooling and frameworks
- Researching threats, vulnerabilities, and exploit techniques within AI technologies
- Incorporate feedback loops with peers on AI research and tooling
- Provide guidance and offense-related insights throughout IBM on AI technologies
Required Technical and Professional Expertise
Competencies Required
- Ability to collaborate effectively with team members
- Strong written and verbal communication skills in English
- Strong creative problem-solving skills
- Experience with offensive use of generative AI and large language models
- Experience developing software used within enterprise environments
- Experience developing offensive tooling or frameworks
Required Technical And Professional Expertise
- Experience attacking AI systems:
- Experience with Model Evasion, Extraction, Inversion, Poisoning attacks as well as LLM Prompt Injection
- Attacking RAG interfaces, deployment orchestrators, and integrations with associated XaaS platform infrastructure
- Strong application security testing experience
- Assessing the potential impact of backdoored or compromised model or AI application environment and validate detections for attacks against datasets.
- History of published AI security testing tools, blogs, CVEs, or conference talks
- 3+ years coding in two or more programming languages (Python, C#, C/C++, Assembly, Rust)
Preferred Technical And Professional Expertise
- Testing of within the MLSecOps pipeline and production environments for attack paths from an adversary’s perspective.
- Focused security testing on SaaS and PaaS platforms leveraged by GenAI applications to insecure security configurations and integrations with AI platforms such as Amazon SageMaker, Azure ML, BigML, Watsonx.ai, etc.
- Attacking MLSecOps training and production environments including targets such as MLflow, Kubeflow, Apache Airflow, H2O.ai and TensorFlow.
- Offensive use of AI agents and workflows- experience evaluating AI models and creating test harnesses for offensive use
- 5+ years of adversary tradecraft industry experience
- History of developing open-source software for the security community
- History of presenting at security conferences
- Experience with Adversarial Robustness Toolbox, TextAttack, Augly, Garak, Pyrit, etc.
- Track record in vulnerability research and CVE assignments related adversarial ML
- Experience with network protocols and packet capture
- Knowledge of Linux internals, Active Directory, Mac, Windows workstations and servers
- Relevant certifications from organizations like Offensive Security’s OSCE, SANS’ GXPN, or CREST’s CSAT/CSAM or demonstrable equivalent skills
- Knowledgeable of the phases of software development, from gathering requirements to deployment (SDLC)
- Experience with enterprise data lakes, relational/vector databases, complex data structures and data analysis tools, offensive data schema development and format conversations
- Experience using and validating AI-as-a-Service platforms such as with AI platforms such as Amazon SageMaker, Azure ML, BigML, Watsonx.ai
- Prior security consulting experience
About Business Unit
IBM Consulting is IBM’s consulting and global professional services business, with market leading capabilities in business and technology transformation. With deep expertise in many industries, we offer strategy, experience, technology, and operations services to many of the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Our people are focused on accelerating our clients’ businesses through the power of collaboration. We believe in the power of technology responsibly used to help people, partners and the planet.
Your Life @ IBM
In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.
Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.
Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.
Are you ready to be an IBMer?
About IBM
IBM's greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.
Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 50 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.
At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.
Location Statement
IBM offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits program. Eligible employees may have access to:
- Healthcare benefits including medical & prescription drug coverage, dental, vision, and mental health & well being
- Financial programs such as 401(k), cash balance pension plan, the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan, financial counseling, life insurance, short & long- term disability coverage, and opportunities for performance based salary incentive programs.
- Generous paid time off including 12 holidays, minimum 56 hours sick time, 120 hours vacation, 12 weeks parental bonding leave in accordance with IBM Policy, and other Paid Care Leave programs. IBM also offers paid family leave benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law.
- Training and educational resources on our personalized, AI-driven learning platform where IBMers can grow skills and obtain industry-recognized certifications to achieve their career goals.
- Diverse and inclusive employee resource groups, giving & volunteer opportunities, and discounts on retail products, services & experiences.
The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year.
This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.
Being You @ IBM
IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.
