Agentic AI Security Engineer

Primary Work Address: 19700 Helix Drive, Ashburn, VA, 20147 Current […] Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account. AI[handle] at Janelia integrates AI agents across the research process. These tools write and execute code, optimize experimental and model parameters, and drive instruments.

Letting AI agents act on shared research infrastructure requires serious safety engineering. The relevant failure mode is usually not a malicious attacker but a capable, misdirected tool running with legitimate user permissions at machine speed: hallucinated commands, instructions hijacked by retrieved content, runaway loops, sandbox escapes. We are hiring the engineer who owns this problem.

You will research, develop, deploy, operate, and analyze the safety stack for agentic AI at Janelia: Sandboxing. Hardened, reproducible execution environments for agent code (kernel- and VM-level isolation, network egress control) on our OpenShift platform and HPC cluster, validated by adversarial testing. Guardrails.

Policy enforcement on agent inputs, outputs, and tool calls; judge models; human approval gates; independent safeguard services that sessions can be routed through, individually or chained. Observability. Attributable audit logging, full-trace capture, real-time monitoring, and post-incident analysis of agent sessions.

You will join early enough to make the foundational architecture decisions, and you will operate what you design. We expect and support open-sourcing and