Security Researcher Mid-level - Paris Office

Who are we?

Escape is one of Europe's fastest-growing cybersecurity startups, backed by Y Combinator, building AI-powered automated penetration testing that finds vulnerabilities before attackers do. We've secured dozens of prestigious enterprise customers, are growing 15%+ MoM.

We recently raised an $18M Series A, accelerating our ambition to build the next generation of application security through agentic, AI-driven systems.

We operate with a US go-to-market playbook (product-led, fast iteration cycles, aggressive growth targets) combined with deep European engineering DNA. Our 18-person engineering team ships daily, owns what they build, and solves hard problems at the intersection of security, distributed systems, and AI.

Job Description

👉 We are seeking a Security Researcher – Mid-level to join Escape and play a central role in advancing the detection capabilities of our DAST and ASM products.

This is an applied security role: think web pentester with strong coding skills. Your mission is to turn offensive security knowledge into scalable, production-grade detection logic.

You will focus on discovering new vulnerability detection techniques, improving existing algorithms, and ensuring Escape remains best-in-class in terms of accuracy, performance, and real-world relevance.

As part of the Security Research team, you will transform security insights and exploitation techniques into concrete detection logic that runs at scale in production. Your work will directly shape the effectiveness of Escape’s scanners and have a measurable impact on customer security outcomes.

Context

• Location: Paris (75002), 2 days remote/week
• Company: Escape – Leading AI Cybersecurity Startup
• Cofounders: CEO (Tristan Kalos) and CTO (Antoine Carossio)
• Engineering Team: 18 Engineers, 4 Technical Leads, 3 Product Owner
• You’ll be working in a close-knit team of 3 outstanding engineers under supervision of a technical lead

Key Responsibilities:

• Vulnerability Research: Identify new classes of vulnerabilities across web applications, APIs, and modern architectures, and reproduce real-world exploitation techniques.
• From Exploit to Detection: Translate manual attack techniques into scalable automated detection logic, designing payload strategies and validation heuristics.
• Algorithm Design & Improvement: Continuously improve detection algorithms with a strong focus on accuracy, signal quality, and reduction of false positives and false negatives.
• Applied R&D: Turn research ideas into practical, production-ready detection logic suitable for large-scale automated scanning.
• Performance & Accuracy Focus: Optimize trade-offs between coverage, noise, scan duration, and infrastructure cost to ensure scanners remain efficient at scale.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with Scanners and Platform teams to integrate research outputs into distributed production systems.
• Technology Watch: Monitor emerging vulnerabilities, CVEs, and offensive research to continuously raise Escape’s detection capabilities.

Tech Stack

• Languages: Compiled languages (Go, Rust), scripting languages (Python) for prototyping
• Research Focus: Vulnerability discovery, detection algorithms, and performance-oriented analysis
• Execution Context: Research outputs integrated into large-scale automated scanners
• Collaboration Surface: Close interaction with production systems and distributed scanning workloads
• Engineering Focus: Accuracy, performance, and applicability of detection logic at scale

Perks

• 💸 Significant equity (Stock Options/BSCPE), making you a true stakeholder in our success.
• ❤️‍🩹 Top-tier health insurance with Alan
• 🍕 Meal vouchers with a Swile
• 💪 Sport subscription with EGYM Wellpass (ex Gymlib)
• 📚 A place to learn and grow: Access to books and online courses to help you excel in your role
• 💻 Top-tier equipment to do your best work
• 🎁 Free time to work on cool Open Source Projects.
• 🌎 Opportunities to present research and engineering work at international conferences like RSAC, BSides, BlackHat, DEFCON, APIDays (New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco, London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona)

Interview Process

We respect your time and will make it quick and efficient. The entire process will be completed within 1 week.

🤓 1 meeting with the HR representative - 30 minutes

💻 1 coding challenge - 1 hour

🤔 1 system design with the Technical Lead - 1 hour

👀 1 culture fit interview the CTO - 30 minutes

🚀 1 strategy interview with the CEO - 30 minutes

💌 Formal hiring proposal.