Threat Hunter

About the Role
VulnCheck is hiring a Principal Threat Hunter to discover, investigate, and document real-world exploitation and attacker infrastructure, and turn those discoveries into durable improvements to VulnCheck's detection capabilities.

VulnCheck operates infrastructure across the internet that gives us a direct view into attacker activity. Canary Intelligence deploys intentionally vulnerable systems and captures real exploitation attempts, giving researchers a steady stream of attacker binaries, source infrastructure, payloads, and exploitation techniques. Target Intelligence maintains a continuously updated view of internet-facing systems, including their exposure to known vulnerabilities and their relationships to scanners, proxies, C2 infrastructure, and other attack infrastructure.

Together, these datasets provide a foundation for research that is difficult to replicate elsewhere. You can observe exploitation as it happens rather than infer it from secondary telemetry, analyze what attackers deploy after gaining access, and pivot from an attacking host into the broader infrastructure behind it.

The role spans the full research process. You will hunt for interesting activity, investigate what you find, develop methods and detections to identify similar activity at scale, and turn those investigations into original threat intelligence. You will help build the tooling and detections needed to support your research and improve VulnCheck's ability to identify meaningful attacker activity.

You will be the first full-time threat hunter at VulnCheck, so there is no existing threat hunting pipeline or playbook to inherit. You will have substantial latitude to define areas of research and help establish how VulnCheck approaches threat hunting as the function grows.

This role is fully remote and open to candidates based anywhere in the United States.

What You'll Do
Hunt for emerging exploitation activity, attacker infrastructure, and novel attacker behavior across VulnCheck's data
Turn discoveries from threat hunting into durable improvements to VulnCheck's detection capabilities, including new rules, queries, tooling, and automation
Investigate exploitation attempts, attacker payloads, binaries, infrastructure, and post-exploitation activity
Build tooling and automation to support threat hunting and large-scale analysis
Pivot across vulnerabilities, hosts, IPs, domains, payloads, and other infrastructure to uncover relationships and broader activity
Turn research findings into actionable threat intelligence for VulnCheck customers
Write customer-facing threat intelligence reports and technical blog posts that clearly explain what you found and why it matters
Present research at conferences and other industry events
Work with vulnerability researchers and other members of the VulnCheck research team to connect observed exploitation with vulnerability intelligence
Help shape the direction, methodology, and capabilities of VulnCheck's threat hunting function as it grows
Use VulnCheck's data and products as an expert customer, identify gaps in our ability to detect or investigate attacker activity, and help drive improvements to close those gaps

What You'll Bring
A demonstrated track record of communicating technical security research through public writing, threat intelligence reports, blogs, presentations, or other published work
Experience hunting for threats, analyzing attacker activity, conducting threat intelligence research, or performing closely related security research
The ability to read and analyze PCAPs and reason about network traffic and protocols
Demonstrated experience developing and tuning detections, including Suricata and/or Snort rules, and translating research findings into repeatable detection capabilities
Experience writing Nuclei templates or other scanners to identify vulnerabilities, exposed services, or attacker infrastructure
Strong programming or scripting ability, with comfort reading and writing code in multiple languages and picking up unfamiliar languages when the research requires it
Experience working with Linux systems, networking, and internet-facing infrastructure
The ability to analyze malware, payloads, scripts, and other artifacts encountered during an investigation
Experience working with large datasets and developing queries or tooling to find meaningful activity within them
The ability to pivot across technical data sources and follow an investigation from an initial indicator to a broader set of infrastructure or activity
The curiosity and independence to identify interesting research questions and pursue them without a predefined playbook

Preferred Qualifications
A substantial body of published security research, particularly work that has had an impact on the security community
Experience researching exploitation campaigns, malware families, attacker infrastructure, or vulnerability exploitation in the wild
Experience working across multiple areas of security research, such as vulnerability research, reverse engineering, malware analysis, threat intelligence, or detection engineering
Experience leading threat intelligence or security research initiatives, including establishing research direction, methodologies, or operational processes