Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing Engineer at Mercor

Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing Engineer – India

Job Type: Hourly Contract (Remote)

Compensation: $14–$21 per hour (USD), depending on experience

Location: Remote (India only)

About Mercor:
Mercor connects elite cybersecurity and engineering talent with the world’s top AI research labs. Backed by investors including Benchmark, General Catalyst, Adam D’Angelo, Larry Summers, and Jack Dorsey, we’re at the forefront of building AI-powered solutions for critical infrastructure and security domains.

About the Role:
Mercor is seeking Ethical Hacking & Penetration Testing Engineers to design and build terminal bench–style problems for evaluating AI agents in adversarial and time-constrained cybersecurity scenarios. Your expertise will help create secure, sandboxed environments and progressive challenges that simulate real-world exploitation, reconnaissance, and remediation tasks—providing a new benchmark for autonomous agent capabilities in cybersecurity.

Key Responsibilities:

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

• Develop reproducible tasks, including reconnaissance, vulnerability analysis, exploit execution, and post-exploitation reporting

• Define multi-stage challenges with clear goals, flags, and success conditions for agent learning and evaluation

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

• Build tooling for environment resets, exploit logging, and automated output validation

• Continuously enhance realism, safety, and reproducibility from basic exploits to complex, multi-step network scenarios

Ideal Qualifications:

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

• Proficiency with Metasploit, Burp Suite, Nmap, Wireshark, John the Ripper, Hydra, sqlmap, or similar tools

• Deep understanding of network security, web vulnerabilities, OS-level exploits, and privilege escalation

• Comfortable with Linux environments, shell scripting, and terminal workflows

• Experience designing or solving CTF challenges (e.g., Hack The Box, TryHackMe) or real-world pentests

• Passion for creative problem design and advancing AI in cybersecurity

Why This Role Is Unique:

• Help create the first cybersecurity benchmark framework for autonomous AI agents

• Combine hands-on red teaming with innovative problem design

• Work at the intersection of AI, security, and agent-based simulation

• High autonomy, creative control, and direct technical impact

Work Structure & Compensation:

• Part-time (20 hrs/week), fully remote, asynchronous work

• Weekly payments via Stripe Connect as an hourly contractor

Mercor is committed to equal opportunity employment and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request.

Apply now to shape the frontier of AI and cybersecurity!