Role overview
Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information across enterprises, governments, and consumers.
Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend harnesses AI to protect organizations and individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints.
The Trend Vision One™ enterprise cybersecurity platform accelerates proactive security outcomes by predicting and preventing threats across the entire digital estate and environments like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.
Proactive security starts here. TrendMicro.com
Location:
This is a hybrid role based out of our Austin, TX office and requires in-office presence three days a week.
Position Summary
Trend Micro is seeking an
Applied AI Architect
with deep experience bridging LLM/SLM model research and enterprise productization. You will lead the technical direction from model architecture selection, fine-tuning, and optimization to deployment and observability, shaping the next generation of agentic AI for cybersecurity. This role demands both foundational knowledge and production practicality — designing and validating novel approaches, then translating them into reliable, scalable solutions deployed in Trend Vision One platform.
What you'll work on
- Drive research-to-production of LLM/SLM systems — from design and fine-tuning to evaluation, deployment, and continual adaptation in enterprise agent workflows.
- Lead technical choices — determine when to apply context engineering, prompt tuning, continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, reasoning fine-tuning, LoRA, or RL.
- Architect high-performance inference and serving using vLLM, NVIDIA NIM, Triton, CUDA, or other optimized frameworks.
- Integrate reinforcement learning frameworks (veRL, SkyRL, PyTorch, Ray RLlib) to enhance reasoning, adaptability, and agent feedback loops.
- Develop and operationalize AI Ops pipelines — build benchmarks and metrics for model evaluation, observability, drift detection, and lifecycle automation.
- Advance agent interoperability using A2A (Agent-to-Agent) or MCP (Model Context Protocol) for large-scale coordination.
- Collaborate with cybersecurity researchers to embed threat reasoning, anomaly detection, and defensive logic directly into model behavior.
- Publish, document, and codify reusable AI blueprints for hybrid (cloud + on-prem) deployments and future research acceleration.
What we're looking for
- Research-driven yet delivery-focused — capable of balancing innovation with practical deployment.
- Data- and results-oriented — every hypothesis must be measurable.
- Ownership mentality — from exploration and experiment to evaluation, optimization, and monitoring.
- Passionate about turning AI research into defensible, intelligent, and proactive cybersecurity systems.
Why Join Trend Micro?
Trend Micro is a leader in AI security. We not only delivered the first open-weight, cybersecurity-focused large language model, but also the industry’s first security companion agent evaluated directly by customers. Trend Vision One integrates endpoint, cloud, network, email, identity, AI application, and data security into a single, unified platform. In this role, you will partner with business leaders to design systems that can reason, learn, and protect—accelerating agility, speed of delivery, and data-centric security. You will help transform cutting-edge research into real-world defense capabilities, protecting millions of users in the generative-AI agent era and enabling enterprises to stay ahead of evolving threats.
What We Offer You
You're important to us. What matters to you, matters to us too. Trend Micro provides benefit options for you and your family.
- Comprehensive medical, dental and vision insurance
- Life insurance
- Short & Long Term Disability
- Pre-partum, maternity, parental and medical leave
- Mental Health Wellness Program
- Adoption Assistance
- Wellness Incentive
- Pet Insurance
- 401(k) with company match
- Paid Time Off
- 14 Annual Holidays
- Tuition Assistance
- Employee Resource Groups
We offer competitive compensation with bonus opportunity tied to company performance, along with room to enhance your skills through ongoing learning and broad technological opportunities. Achieving work-life balance is a priority, complemented by team activities, fostering an environment rooted in equity, inclusion, and collaboration, that is reflected in both our culture and our work.
Be Passionate. Be Innovative. Be a Trender.
This position does not offer sponsorship for work permit applications or renewals, either now or in the future.
Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment-based visa sponsorship, both currently and moving forward. The company will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work visa status for this role (including, but not limited to, H-1B, L-1, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, F-1, J-1, OPT, CPT, or any other employment-based.
At Trend Micro, we embrace change, empower people, and encourage innovation in a connected world. Our diversity and multicultural workforce are key contributing factors to our success across the globe. Trend Micro provides equal employment opportunity for all applicants and employees. Trend Micro does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy and childbirth or related medical conditions, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, family care leave status, veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation, or gender identity.