AI Pioneer

The role

PortSwigger is going all-in on AI. Not as a side project, not as a slogan - as the central way we intend to work across every part of the business. This role is one of a small number of people who will help us actually do that.

It's a role for a builder. You'll drop into hard, unscoped AI problems across the business, usually in the parts that haven't figured AI out yet. You'll embed alongside the people closest to the work for around two weeks, ship something that actually makes things better, then move on to the next problem. Roving, not tribe-aligned. Always in the work, never writing slides about it.

About you

You're fanatical about AI. It's rewired how you live.

You wake up and check what dropped overnight - a model release, a new agent framework, a benchmark, a product launch — and if something interesting landed, half your morning's gone to playing with it. Your weekend project is the next tool you wanted that nobody had built yet. Your home is full of little things you've stitched together for yourself: the budget tracker, the weekly meal planner, the shopping list that re-orders itself, the bedtime story generator for your kid or your nephew. Your browser history is release notes and changelogs and half a dozen Discord tabs.

You have personal subscriptions to several AI products and you've played with many more. Within hours of a new one dropping you're inside it, and you have a real opinion by the end of the week about what it's actually good at. You switch tools when the industry moves — you're not loyal to anything that stops being the best.

You can't shut up about it. Friends gently take the piss. You don't mind, because you can see what's coming and they can't yet.

You're working harder than you ever have - and loving it. The AI lever is so big that you're getting 10x more done in 1.5x the time, and you keep finding more.

You're probably a bit stuck, though. Your current employer treats AI as a side project — the tooling is blocked, the spend is capped, the ambition is missing. You’ve found yourself pushing for better tooling, clearer permission, and more ambition because you can see the opportunity being missed. You want to be somewhere it's taken seriously. That's the bit that's going to make this role grab you.

You don't just talk about AI - you build with it. You've taken an ambiguous brief, with no spec and no team, and produced a working thing under your own steam. Recently. You measured whether it actually helped, because you're as interested in the evals as you are in the build. You leave an artefact trail - repos, prototypes, write-ups, side projects - and that's how we'll get to know how you think.

You travel light across domains. Drop you into legal, marketing, customer success, recruitment, operations, finance, data — and you see the agentic opportunity quickly. You aren't thrown by unfamiliar subject matter. You work alongside the domain expert, not above them. You ask the right question to get the context you (and the AI) need to do good work. You're good at figuring out what someone really wants, not just what they say they want. You explain how AI works in a way that lands with the person actually doing the job.

You bring energy without performing. You don't have to be a jazzy extrovert - but you're personally lit up by what's possible, and that pulls people along. Sceptics walk away from a conversation with you wanting to try something.