Senior Researcher, Device & Platform Intelligence

Location: Hyderabad

About the Role

We are looking for a senior researcher who owns the platform side of our device research strategy — how iOS, Android, browsers, CDNs, and network protocols expose signal that can be used to identify and contextualise a device. You will own research directions end-to-end: forming hypotheses about new signal sources, building prototypes and research tooling, validating findings, and partnering with product and engineering to graduate proven concepts into production.

This role is a company-wide subject-matter expert for platform-level research, sitting alongside a parallel researcher focused on adversarial detection (bots, anti-detect tooling, and threat actors), and collaborating with our data science function for signal modelling and productionisation.

What You Will Do

- Own research strategy for cross-domain device identity discovery across browser, native mobile app, network, and AI-agent surfaces.
- Track Apple and Android developer/product documentation, App Store and Play Store policy changes, OS betas, and browser vendor roadmaps to anticipate changes that affect signal availability — before they ship.
- Research web protocol innovation beyond JavaScript: HTTP semantics, TLS and network fingerprints, client hints, privacy sandbox mechanisms, and emerging browser standards, and their implications for device identification.
- Explore deployment directly into CDNs to observe traffic in flight across a client's entire estate, extending signal collection beyond the endpoint to the network path itself.
- Develop lightweight collectors that simplify deployment, maximise digital interaction coverage, and capture a growing set of digital attributes.
- Track the agentic AI ecosystem (MCP and similar agent protocols, agent architectures) and how agentic clients interact with web and API surfaces, identifying where cross-domain device identity needs to extend to agent traffic.




- Build proof-of-concept collectors and research tooling; document findings; hand validated techniques to engineering for product development.
- Partner with the data science function to translate raw signal discoveries into features and inputs for production models; you are not responsible for building or maintaining those models.
- Serve as the company-wide subject-matter expert for platform-level (iOS/Android/browser/network) research; produce detailed internal documentation.

Experience
- 8 years in software engineering or platform/security research, with at least 3 years in a research-oriented role.

Tech Skills — Must Have
- Deep expertise in at least two of: native mobile app development at scale (iOS/Android SDKs, App Store/Play environments), browser internals and web protocols, network-level fingerprinting, or CDN architecture.
- Strong CDN knowledge — understanding of how content delivery networks route, cache, and terminate traffic, and how they could be used as a deployment point to observe traffic in flight.
- Demonstrated experience going beyond documented APIs — mining developer documentation, OS release notes, and standards proposals to discover signal opportunities and predict setting changes.
- Experience developing lightweight collectors that simplify deployment, maximise digital interaction coverage, and capture a growing set of digital attributes.
- Strong programming skills in JavaScript/TypeScript plus at least one of Swift, Kotlin, or Go; comfort writing non-production proof-of-concept code quickly.
- Ability to turn ambiguous problem statements into clear experiments with measurable outcomes; strong written and verbal communication in English.

Tech Skills — Nice to Have
- Familiarity with privacy regulation and privacy-preserving signal design (consent frameworks, on-device processing).
- Working knowledge of the agentic AI ecosystem: MCP or similar agent protocols, and how agentic clients interact with web and API surfaces.
- Exposure to reverse engineering or threat analysis, even if not the primary focus of past roles.

📌 Senior Researcher, Device & Platform Intelligence (Hyderabad)
🏢 NR Consulting
📍 Hyderabad