Principal Vulnerability Engineer

Hello, let us introduce ourselves!

watchTowr is the Preemptive Exposure Management capability trusted by Fortune 500 companies and critical infrastructure providers.

By combining proactive threat intelligence, real attacker telemetry, and automated red teaming, watchTowr continuously identifies and validates real exposure - so security teams can outrun real-world threats.

When exploitation happens in hours, watchTowr delivers what no one else can: time to respond.

We are a global team of operators, researchers, and engineers who have spent years thinking like attackers - and we are now building the technology to stop them. Our work is recognised across the industry, with original vulnerability research from watchTowr Labs and innovations like Instinct and Attacker Eye shaping the future of cybersecurity.

Backed by $29M in funding, recognised by Gartner, and scaling fast across the globe, we are in a high-growth phase of our journey. We are a young, high-energy, and research-driven team, obsessed with building world-class technology - and we want exceptional people to join us.

But what’s the role?

We're looking for a Principal Vulnerability Engineer that understands the full lifecycle from discovery to detection to deployment. You'll split your time between hands-on vulnerability research, building production-quality tooling, and pushing the boundaries of how LLMs can accelerate offensive security workflows. This isn't a pure vulnerability research role.

This isn't a pure engineering role. It's both; and more.

Sounds great – what will I do?

• Conduct security research across both 0-days and n-days, reverse-engineering patches and performing analysis via patch diffing across both source-available and binary-only targets

• Build and maintain internal tooling for automated vulnerability discovery, exploit validation, and detection signature generation

• Design and implement production-grade LLM-powered workflows that accelerate vulnerability research

• You will be focused on looking for the vulnerabilities that matter — high-impact weaknesses that would have a material impact on our clients. We don’t care about weak SSL ciphers, we care about Remote Code Execution.

• If your dream is to speak at conferences and present your research to the world - we will support you to make it happen!

Sounds perfect to me, what specifics are you looking for?

Ideal Experience

Ideally, you should have 5 or more equivalent real-world years of experience doing a mix of vulnerability research and software engineering, with:

• Demonstrated track record of original 0-day vulnerability discovery, with public advisories, CVEs, or equivalent evidence.

• Proven experience with n-day research and patch diffing - you've pulled apart a binary diff and had a working PoC before the write-up landed.

• Competence across both web and binary vulnerability classes. You can audit a PHP application for auth bypasses in the morning and reverse a firmware update for heap overflows in the afternoon.

• Production-grade software engineering experience, with code written and deployed in production used by real users, ideally written in Python.

• Proven experience with common security tooling: Burp Suite, Ghidra/IDA, debuggers, fuzzers, and the surrounding ecosystem.

• Practical, hands-on experience using LLMs to improve your own research or engineering workflow, with a clear-eyed view of what works and what doesn't.

• Exposure to startups or high-growth scale-ups, with comfort navigating ambiguity and fast-changing priorities.

• Proven ability to thrive under pressure and adapt to shifting priorities.

• Proactive, collaborative, and ownership-driven mindset.

• Passion for continuous improvement and innovation.

• Ability to learn quickly and apply new concepts effectively.

What’s in it for me?

• Competitive compensation - we believe that hard work, skills and ambition should be fairly compensated.

• Meaningful role in a company - You will be a key and early contributor to a fast-growing cybersecurity business that helps protect some of the world's largest enterprises.

• The best tools and powerful kit - we enable you with the tools to effectively fulfil your role.

• Endless opportunities – we are in a high-growth phase of our journey, and plan to promote from within as we scale.

• Work with cyber security experts – we are solving cutting-edge industry-wide cyber security challenges with some of the world’s most advanced organisations.

watchTowr is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer

At watchTowr, we’re dedicated to fostering an inclusive, respectful, and diverse environment where every individual is recognised for their talent and potential. Our hiring decisions are guided by your capabilities, experience, and what you bring to the role - not by unrelated personal attributes.

We have a zero-tolerance approach to any form of discrimination or harassment. This includes - but isn’t limited to - discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, colour, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, pregnancy or parental status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

We actively encourage people from all backgrounds to apply. Even if you don’t tick every box in the job description, we’d still love to hear from you.