Founding Scientist

The Role

We're hiring a Founding Scientist — a founding executive who will own the hardest open problems on Multifactor's roadmap and carry the answers all the way into production.

This is not a research-lab sinecure, and it's not a publishing post with a fancy title. The problems we need solved have no existing solutions in industry or academia. You'll work directly with our founder & CEO — whose decade of cryptographic research and patents underpin the company — to set the research agenda, then prototype, build, and ship it yourself. The loop between "conjecture" and "in production" here is measured in days, not quarters.

Few roles offer this much leverage: the systems you invent will define how millions of humans safely delegate their digital identities to AI agents.

Problems You'll Own

A representative sample of what's on the whiteboard. None of these has a known answer yet:

• Fine-grained delegated authorization for AI agents. Build a policy model expressive enough to capture real human intent — "my agent may use my LinkedIn to post on my behalf, but never reply to comments," or "it may place trades under $1,000, but only in these sectors" — and a runtime that enforces those policies against a live, authenticated session, detecting and stopping violating actions before they complete. Formal policy semantics meet real-time semantic analysis of agent behavior.
• Natural-language semantic auditing. Give users provable, human-readable answers to "what exactly did this agent do with my account?" — at scale, across arbitrary websites.
• High-precision authentication-message understanding. Identify and route one-time codes and verification links from email and SMS streams with near-zero false positives, strict privacy guarantees, and nothing else ever read.
• Durable session continuity. Keep authenticated sessions warm, healthy, and instantly resumable across cloud and local environments — so neither users nor their agents ever wait at a login wall — and make it work reliably across the chaotic diversity of session-management behavior on the modern web.
• Cryptographic delegation at scale. Push our peer-reviewed cryptographic foundations into new territory: re-encryption-based sharing, social and threshold recovery, delegated payments where an agent transacts without ever seeing the instrument, and policy-bound agent access to encrypted user data.
• Automated detection & remediation. Turn a security signal — say, a credential surfacing in a breach — into safe, automatic, end-to-end remediation across a user's accounts.

What You'll Do

• Set the research agenda for the company, in direct partnership with the CEO.
• Solve and ship. Take problems from whiteboard to peer-review-quality design to production code — personally. Research that doesn't reach users is unfinished here.
• Move at startup speed, with frontier AI coding and research tools as a force multiplier. We expect leverage, not headcount.
• Compound the moat. Translate your work into patents, publications, and influence over emerging agentic-identity standards.

Who You Are

• A computer scientist with real depth in two or more of: applied cryptography, security & privacy, machine learning / AI agents, formal methods, distributed systems. PhD preferred, not required — a track record of cracking genuinely novel problems matters more than the credential.
• A polyglot builder. You move fluidly across languages, stacks, and abstraction levels, and you ship your own ideas rather than handing off specs.
• Forged under constraints. You've done research where the clock was real — a startup, a competitive lab, an industrial team — and "interesting" was never enough; "working" was the bar.
• Drawn to the void. You're motivated precisely by problems with no literature to lean on, and by being the person the company counts on to find the answer anyway.
• A clear communicator. You can pitch a research direction to investors and review a cryptographic protocol line by line. Both happen here.

Nice to Have

• Fellowship-caliber distinction (Hertz, NSF GRFP, Churchill, or similar).
• Founder or founding-team experience — especially research-driven products or an acquired startup.
• Hands-on work with trusted execution environments, browser automation, agent frameworks, or authorization systems.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $195,000 – $245,000
• Equity: 1.00% – 2.00% 
• Unlimited PTO with a culture that actually encourages using it
• Wellbeing & professional development reimbursements
• Commuter benefits for getting to our SF office
• Employer-sponsored retirement savings (401k w/ matching)
• Employer-sponsored dental, vision, health, and life benefits