Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing Engineer - India

Mercor is hiring an Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing Engineer to create terminal bench–style problems and tasks involving agents within the ethical hacking and penetration testing domain, as part of a hiring effort for its AI lab partner building advanced agent-based infrastructure. This role is ideal for cybersecurity professionals with hands-on red team experience and a passion for simulating realistic exploitation scenarios. You'll be responsible for designing interactive terminal environments that challenge autonomous agents to perform system reconnaissance, vulnerability exploitation, and post-exploitation tasks in secure, sandboxed settings.

You’re a great fit if you:

• Have 3+ years of experience in ethical hacking, penetration testing, or red teaming.

• Are proficient with tools like Metasploit, Burp Suite, Nmap, Wireshark, John the Ripper, Hydra, or sqlmap.

• Have strong knowledge of network security, web application vulnerabilities, OS-level exploits, and privilege escalation techniques.

• Are comfortable with Linux environments, shell scripting, and terminal-based workflows.

• Have designed or solved CTF challenges, labs (e.g. Hack The Box, TryHackMe), or real-world pentesting scenarios.

• Are interested in testing autonomous agents on cybersecurity tasks — from reconnaissance and exploitation to remediation and system recovery.

• Value clean, reproducible environments and enjoy crafting progressive challenges with increasing complexity.

Primary Goal of This Role

To create terminal bench–style tasks and environments where autonomous agents are tested on ethical hacking and penetration testing scenarios — such as port scanning, exploit execution, password cracking, firewall bypass, privilege escalation, and more. These benchmarks will serve as a testbed for evaluating agent capabilities in adversarial, time-constrained, and multi-step security workflows.

What You’ll Do

• Design secure, sandboxed terminal environments that simulate real-world attack surfaces (e.g., misconfigured services, vulnerable web apps, open ports).

• Build reproducible tasks such as reconnaissance, vulnerability analysis, exploit execution, and post-exploitation reporting.

• Define multi-stage challenges with clear goals, flags, and success conditions tailored to agent learning loops.

• Collaborate with AI engineers to define reward functions, evaluation metrics, and progressive difficulty tiers.

• Develop tooling for environment resets, exploit detection logging, and output validation.

• Continuously improve realism, safety, and reproducibility of challenges — from simple local exploits to complex network-based scenarios.

Why This Role Is Exciting

• You’ll help build the first cybersecurity-focused benchmark framework for autonomous agents.

• You’ll combine your red teaming skills with creative problem design in a new frontier of AI research.

• You'll work with a fast-moving, high-trust team focused on experimentation, safety, and technical depth.

We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.

Contract and Payment Terms

• You will be engaged as an independent contractor.
• This is a fully remote role that can be completed on your own schedule.
• Projects can be extended, shortened, or concluded early depending on needs and performance.
• Your work at Mercor will not involve access to confidential or proprietary information from any employer, client, or institution.
• Payments are weekly on Stripe or Wise based on services rendered.
• Please note: We are unable to support H1-B or STEM OPT candidates at this time.

About Mercor

Mercor partners with leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. You will work on projects that focus on training and enhancing AI systems. You will be paid competitively, collaborate with leading researchers, and help shape the next generation of AI systems in your area of expertise.