AI Security Engineer
Oct 11, 2023
Last Updated
•
Organizational and “Meta” Roles
Description
A Software Security Engineer is usually a key member of an organization’s security team. In major AI organizations, an additional expertise beyond traditional software cybersecurity, also involves securing the integrity of the output of the AI model produced by the organization. This involves Modeling/Detecting/Mitigating vulnerabilities associated with the fact that customers will interact with the model, potentially introducing adversarial input leading to problematic and dangerous behavior of the model. They usually possess substantial expertise in conducting security assessments (evaluating code, architecture, model mechanistic interpretability, threat modeling, etc.) to understand the attack surface of complex systems, and review and offer recommendations for their mitigation. A Software Security Engineer will work, among other things, on incorporating security measures into AI systems at the algorithm, software, and infrastructure levels to minimize risks from emerging threats.
Example tasks
Perform security architecture design (network security or application security).
Collaborate with AI researchers and developers to design and implement secure software architectures and algorithmic measures for adversarial robustness.
Help build tools, infrastructure, and platforms that protect the organization’s data and technical environment, e.g., against poisoned training data.
Perform assessments of attack vectors, attack surfaces, and the relative priority of different vulnerabilities.
Design and test software security architecture recommendations for existing and future systems.
Conduct technical security evaluations, threat modeling, code audits, red-teaming, and design reviews on ML systems and their foundational technologies using an offensive approach.
Manage a production operations software vulnerability remediation program.
Come up with new ideas to solve security problems.
Why we think this job is impactful
The role of Software Security Engineer is crucial for mitigating AI catastrophic risk, as this type of professional specializes, among other things, in finding and fixing security issues and vulnerabilities in complex AI systems. A Software Security Engineer will contribute to making AI systems safer by adding (novel) security measures, and by helping ensure that malevolent entities or individuals cannot conduct efficacious attacks on complex AI systems, such as jailbreaking them. It is crucial to ensure that AI systems are not unintentionally leaked to the public, have their guardrails deactivated, or acquired by malicious actors, and Software Security Engineers are instrumental in fostering a safety-oriented organizational culture.
How Successif can help
We have developed a way to assess potential candidate’s fitness for this role and collected sample interview questions that can be asked for this job. If you are passionate about mitigating the risks of transformative AI systems and believe you would be a good fit for this role, apply for our career services.