Job Description:

• Analyze newly disclosed and actively exploited vulnerabilities under tight timelines
• Determine vulnerability root cause, exploitability, and real-world impact
• Reproduce vulnerabilities and build working exploits from patch diffs, advisories, and limited public information
• Document behavioral differences across affected versions and platforms
• Publish technically rigorous root cause analyses
• Advise detection and vulnerability check engineers on coverage
• Help internal teams and customers understand threat urgency and impact
• Serve as a go-to expert during high-velocity security events
• Develop and contribute high-quality exploit modules to Metasploit
• Improve the Metasploit Framework through new capabilities, tooling, library enhancements, and quality improvements
• Review community and internal module contributions
• Partner with the Metasploit engineering team on roadmap priorities
• Identify and research new vulnerabilities affecting enterprise technologies
• Help define longer-term research priorities and emerging attack-surface perspectives
• Contribute technical trend analysis to Rapid7 research reports and publications
• Represent the team's work through conference talks, webcasts, blog posts, and media engagements
• Mentor and develop other researchers through code review, pairing, documentation, and technical guidance
• Explain technical risk to audiences ranging from engineers to executives

Requirements:

• Demonstrable expertise across most major vulnerability classes and exploitation techniques
• Ability to reproduce vulnerabilities and attacks quickly and effectively
• Experience developing complex exploit chains from scratch, including from patch diffs or minimal public detail
• Strong reverse engineering and binary/code diffing skills, including against large codebases or binaries
• Expert-level understanding of networking, operating system internals for one or more major operating systems, and/or bypassing common exploit mitigations
• Track record of writing about vulnerabilities and exploits for a public audience
• Track record of speaking about research at conferences, webcasts, or similar venues
• Ability to build custom tooling as needed
• Ability to scope work into clear milestones rather than monolithic deliverables
• Willingness to mentor and teach
• Clear communication of objectives, rationale, complex attack patterns, and risks to technical stakeholders and detection engineers
• Experience driving change and focusing on emerging threats
• Accountability for driving outcomes and meeting commitments
• Experience working cross-functionally during time-sensitive security events
• Ability to translate technical findings for non-technical stakeholders
• Alignment with Rapid7's core values
• Published zero-day vulnerabilities and CVEs (nice to have)
• Prior contributions to the Metasploit Framework or other open source security projects (nice to have)
• Media training or experience speaking with journalists (nice to have)
• Experience applying AI or LLM-based tooling to accelerate vulnerability research or exploit development (nice to have)

Benefits:

• Variable/incentive compensation (excluded from base salary range)
• Equity (where applicable/eligible)
• Benefits (where applicable/eligible)
• Fair and equitable compensation practices