Founding Scientist

About Multifactor

Zero-trust authentication, authorization, and auditing for AI agents

The role

### The RoleWe'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 OwnA 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

Skills

• Rust
• TypeScript
• Distributed Systems
• Machine Learning
• Cryptography
• Information Security
• Software Security