[woodruffw]

"Cybersecurity research" is a very large domain, so it's hard to offer a wholly encompassing answer here! The company I work for[1] does a great deal of program analysis research, primarily in and around the LLVM ecosystem. Other companies/groups in our domain(s) include Galois, Inria, and GrammaTech.

In terms of working in our domain: we frequently find it difficult to hire for pre-existing compilers or program analysis skills (it's a small community!), so we generally long for strong engineers with security/low-level fundamentals who don't mind making a pivot.

As for how the job is: I personally find it very fulfilling, but it definitely contains a degree of uncertainty (particularly when doing government-funded research) that ordinary SWEs/SREs may not be used to. I've noticed that it takes new hires a decent amount of time to acclimate and become comfortable with the idea of research engineering, meaning engineering where we expect less than 100% of all exploratory avenues to have productive outcomes. This can be a large culture shock compared to typical engineering, where tasking is defined primarily by business requirements that don't contain a large degree of uncertainty or ambiguity in terms of implementation approach.

[1]: https://www.trailofbits.com/

[xenocratus]

Just a note, you'll also find research like this, even if not as "visible", at most heavily-tech firms: FAANG, Arm, Intel... Though it's quite a niche area still, I get a bit claustrophobic when I think about just how few jobs are relevant to the kind of research engineering that I want to do. :)

[woodruffw]

Absolutely! This work is by no means limited to the firm that I work for or others in our sphere; it's just the small group I'm familiar with. I happen to know for a fact that Meta, Google, etc. all have excellent security and program analysis research teams (although I'd also say that the smaller firms in this space punch above their general weight class :-)).

[wslh]

Great clarification about the research engineering concept and security. I think the kind of security services a company such as Trail of Bits does involves a lot of craft and craft is difficult to teach, it requires a lot of patience and attitude for trial and error beyond more advanced scientific methods.