Senior Vulnerability Researcher

Location: St. Petersburg, FL or San Antonio, TX

Compensation: $160,000–$235,000 base + relocation + comprehensive benefits

Clearance: Active U.S. Top Secret clearance required with ability to upgrade to SAP

About the Role

Service to Success is supporting a mid-sized research organization with nearly 20 years of experience serving U.S. national security missions. The team is seeking a Senior Vulnerability Researcher to lead advanced vulnerability research and exploit development across complex real-world systems.

This role is ideal for someone who wants to stay deeply technical long-term, work with a high degree of autonomy, and investigate challenging attack surfaces across operating systems, kernels, firmware, hypervisors, embedded platforms, and application stacks. The right candidate will be comfortable taking ambiguous research problems from initial hypothesis through validated findings and communicating those findings clearly to technical and mission stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead advanced vulnerability research efforts across complex software, firmware, embedded, and low-level systems
• Scope, plan, and execute research projects from initial concept through validated technical findings

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• Perform reverse engineering, binary analysis, in-memory analysis, and exploit development across multiple architectures
• Research real-world weaknesses in modern systems and evaluate potential mitigations
• Analyze undocumented or partially documented system behavior
• Build, modify, or extend internal tools, interfaces, and workflows to support research objectives
• Collaborate with other senior researchers to shape technical direction and review complex work
• Present findings clearly to internal stakeholders and customers
• Contribute to a strong technical culture through mentorship, documentation, and knowledge sharing

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on vulnerability research and exploit development experience

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• Active U.S. Top Secret clearance, with ability to upgrade to TS/SCI SAP
• Experience researching and exploiting complex systems such as operating systems, kernels, firmware, hypervisors, embedded platforms, or application stacks
• Strong reverse engineering skills, including analysis of compiled binaries
• Experience working across architectures such as x86/x64, ARM, PowerPC, or similar
• Ability to independently scope ambiguous or underexplored attack surfaces with minimal guidance
• Experience designing, testing, and evaluating exploitation techniques and modern mitigation defenses
• Ability to analyze low-level system behavior and reason through unfamiliar technical environments
• Experience building or improving tooling to support research workflows

Why This Role

This is a strong fit for a researcher who wants to remain on a deeply technical individual contributor path rather than being pushed toward management or repetitive product security work. The organization offers meaningful national security mission alignment, complex technical problems, senior-level autonomy, and the opportunity to help shape research direction within a growing team.