Symphoria is a small team building an evidentiary substrate for journalists, prosecutors, and civic investigators. The work draws on cryptography, agent systems, intelligence tradecraft, and editorial discipline. We hire the people we can find who can do all four at the level the work requires.
Role I · Engineering
Senior Software Engineer — Cryptographic Ledger
Build the substrate that the rest of the company runs on. The ledger is the part of Symphoria that has to be right; everything else can change.
What you'd be working on
The Ed25519 signing pipeline, the Merkle batch construction, the OpenTimestamps anchoring, the verification tooling any reader can run offline, and the public ledger API.
What we look for
Five‑plus years writing production Rust under load. Working knowledge of Bitcoin script and Taproot edge cases, cryptographic primitives at the level of Real World Crypto paper readers, and the formal‑verification mindset (familiarity with Lean 4 or Coq for protocol‑level work is a plus). The instinct to design for adversarial conditions before they arise.
Remote, US-based. · Compensation competitive with senior infrastructure roles at well‑funded series‑A startups.
Role II · Engineering
Senior Software Engineer — Investigation Platform
Build the product layer that investigators actually use — the chat agent, the entity resolution, the evidence ingest, the graph.
What you'd be working on
Agentic investigation workflows on Claude and other frontier models; cross‑jurisdictional entity resolution against names in non‑Latin scripts; the Neo4j knowledge graph that backs the canvas; the federated‑learning pipeline for the on‑premise deployment.
What we look for
Five‑plus years building AI‑native products. Hands‑on experience with retrieval‑augmented generation, agent frameworks, and graph databases. A taste for problems that don't have textbook answers.
Remote, US-based. · Compensation competitive.
Role III · Investigation
Principal Investigator, Open‑Source Intelligence
Lead the investigations the platform exists for. Encode tradecraft into the system itself.
What you'd be working on
Cross‑jurisdictional cases at the frontier — sanctions and shadow‑fleet attribution, dark‑fleet AIS spoofing, post‑Tornado cross‑chain laundering (Railgun, THORChain, zk‑mixers, Lazarus‑flow tracing), supply‑chain diligence in non‑cooperative jurisdictions (Xinjiang, Myanmar, Russia‑linked tier‑N), state‑aligned influence operations (Doppelganger, Storm‑1516, Spamouflage evolutions), and labor‑trafficking source attribution. You would also be designing the platform's agentic investigation pipelines — turning the methods you have refined by hand into agents the next investigator on the platform can run.
Your toolbox today
Maltego, Sayari, OpenCorporates, OCCRP Aleph, ICIJ Datashare, Chainalysis Reactor or TRM Labs, Arkham/Breadcrumbs/MetaSleuth for on‑chain, SkyFi/Planet/Capella for tasking, Picarta and GeoSpy for ML‑assisted geolocation, Hunchly for court‑admissible record, Open Measures for fringe‑platform breadth, Censys/Shodan/FOFA for infrastructure, InVID‑WeVerify and Truepic/C2PA‑aware tools for media provenance. Comfortable scripting your own multimodal pipelines in Python with Claude or open‑source models for entity extraction over multilingual corpora.
What we look for
A background drawn from one or two of: Bellingcat or OCCRP or ICIJ contributors, US Treasury OFAC/FinCEN, national‑security agencies of the United States or allies, NYT Visual Investigations, ProPublica, BBC Africa Eye, or the C4ADS / Sayari analytical track. A public portfolio of attributable investigations is the strongest signal we can read. Multilingual capacity — Russian, Mandarin, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish — is prized. Trace Labs medalists are heard.
Remote with periodic travel. · Compensation negotiated.
Role IV · Research
Principal Adversarial Researcher
Break the platform before adversaries do. The substrate's claim is cryptographic; the product layer is agentic; the supply chain is shared with everyone else's AI infrastructure. All of it has to be tested by someone who treats the test as research, not as a checklist.
What you'd be working on
At the substrate: Ed25519 implementation pitfalls (signature malleability, non‑canonical points, cofactor‑8), OpenTimestamps adversarial scenarios (calendar collusion, batch substitution, retention‑window attacks), Bitcoin script edge cases post‑Taproot, key‑management and HSM bypass paths.
At the product layer: indirect prompt injection against the platform's agents reading attacker‑controlled documents and web pages, training‑data and RAG poisoning (extending the line of work Anthropic and the UK AISI published on 250‑document backdoors), agent tool‑use abuse, scheming and sandbagging evaluations on the lines Apollo Research and METR have set.
At the supply chain: SLSA‑grade attestation review, post‑XZ‑style backdoor screening of dependencies, Sigstore/cosign verification of the build pipeline.
Your toolbox today
Sliver, Mythic, Brute Ratel, custom C2; AI‑assisted exploitation (PentestGPT‑class workflows, LLM‑augmented fuzzing in the OSS‑Fuzz‑Gen vein); Pacu, Stratus Red Team, Peirates / KubiScan for cloud and Kubernetes; the OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS as framing matrices; Lean 4 or Coq familiarity for the cryptographic side; Foundry and Echidna for any smart‑contract‑adjacent work.
What we look for
A public research trail above a CVE count — Project Zero, Trail of Bits, NCC Group, IOActive, Atredis lineage; NSA TAO / CNO alumni; HackerOne live‑hacking event finalists and Pwn2Own champions; talks on the main stages at Black Hat, DEFCON, OffensiveCon, REcon, USENIX Security, or Real World Crypto. OSEE and OSCE3 are read; novel research published is read more. The bar is: you have already done work that other people in the field cite.
Remote, US-based. · Compensation negotiated.
Role V · Operations
Director of Intelligence Operations — Mission‑Aligned Veterans
What you'd be working on
Building the human side of Symphoria's investigation capability — working directly with the journalists, prosecutors, and civic researchers who use the platform; translating tradecraft into product; setting the standards by which the platform's output is held to account in boardrooms, courtrooms, and the press.
What we look for
Fifteen‑plus years of operational experience in U.S. or allied intelligence services, federal law enforcement, or military intelligence. A mission orientation that survived the work — a conviction that what the public knows is the public's to verify, not its institutions' to authorize. Comfort working with a small founding team.
Remote with periodic travel. · Compensation negotiated.
Role VI · Editorial
Editorial Lead — Director of the Record
Symphoria is a publishing operation as much as a software one. The voice of the platform — the constitution, the public‑facing investigations, the press materials, the case studies — is itself part of the substrate.
What you'd be working on
The editorial output of the platform; coordinating with the journalists and researchers whose investigations the ledger anchors; shaping how Symphoria speaks to its readers; the press strategy when the work warrants press; the ongoing record of what the company has chosen, on a given day, to inscribe.
What we look for
Ten‑plus years of editorial experience — investigative journalism, longform, documentary, civic‑tech communications, or serious institutional editorial. A range that includes anti–human‑trafficking, intelligence‑adjacent, or civic‑memory subject matter. A reader of the constitution who recognized the voice as the one they have spent a career trying to write in.
