Head of Engineering (Research)

is seeking a Head of Engineering (Research) to scale one of the worlds leading AI safety research teams through a critical growth phase. You will instill excellent people and project management systems to enable our team to rapidly test and iterate on new ideas while maintaining high quality. You will scale the team from three to five research pods expanding from 15 to 30 technical staff. You will be the key glue that streamlines internal partnerships with other divisions and manage key relationships with external stakeholders we work with including leading AI companies and government AI safety institutes. We expect this roles primary focus to be building managing and scaling (90%) the technical team with minimal individual contributor (IC) or engineering focused work (10%). This role would be perfect for an experienced technical leader looking to work in an impact-driven environment.

About Us

is a non-profit AI research institute dedicated to ensuring advanced AI is safe and beneficial for everyone. Our mission is to facilitate breakthrough AI safety research advance global understanding of AI risks and solutions and foster a coordinated global response.

Since our founding in July 2022 weve grown quickly to 30 staff producing over 40 influential academic papers and establishing leading AI Safety events. Our work is recognized globally with publications at premier venues such as NeurIPS ICML and ICLR and features in the Financial Times Nature News and MIT Technology Review.

We drive practical change through red-teaming with frontier model developers and government institutes. Most recently we discovered major issues with Anthropics latest model the same day it was released and worked with OpenAI to safeguard their latest model. Additionally we help steer and grow the AI safety field through developing research roadmaps with renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio; running an AI safety-focused co-working space in Berkeley housing 40 members; and supporting the community through targeted grants to technical researchers.

About

Our research team likes to move fast. We explore promising research directions in AI safety and scale up only those showing a high potential for impact. Unlike other AI safety labs that take a bet on a single research direction aims to pursue a diverse portfolio of projects. Our model is to conduct initial investigations into a range of high-potential areas. We incubate the most promising directions through a combination of in-house research field-building events and targeted grants. Once the core research problems are solved we work to scale them to a minimum viable prototype demonstrating their validity to AI companies and governments to drive adoption.

Our current focus areas include:

• Mitigating AI deception: studying when lie detectors induce honesty or evasion and developing model organisms for deception and sandbagging

• Evaluating and red-teaming: Conducting pre- and post-release adversarial evaluations of frontier models (e.g. Claude 4 Opus ChatGPT Agent GPT-5); developing novel attacks to support this work; and exploring new threat models (e.g. persuasion tampering risks).

• Robustness: working to rigorously solve these security problems through building a science of security and robustness for AI from demonstrating superhuman systems can be vulnerable through to scaling laws for robustness.

• Explainability: developing foundational techniques such as codebook features and AC/DC and applying them to understand core safety problems like learned planning.

is one of the largest independent AI safety research institutes and is rapidly growing with the goal of diversifying and deepening our research portfolio. For that reason were seeking a Head of Engineering (Research) to manage the team accelerate delivery and grow the team to continue to scale our impact.

About the Role

This role is critical to mission. Our research directly influences how the most capable AI systems are developed and deployed. You will determine whether we can scale fast enough to keep safety ahead of rapidly advancing AI capabilities. Beyond scaling you will work directly with leading researchers at to increase the velocity of their research and with key decisionmakers in industry and government to translate our research to tangible impact.

As the Head of Engineering (Research) you will manage research team being responsible for our teams delivery and execution. You will:

• Manage the leads of our research pods and engineering pod holding them accountable for their respective pods progress.

• Instill excellent people and project management systems that enable researchers to iterate rapidly while maintaining rigor including through mentorship and coaching of pod leads.

• Scale growing our technical team from 15 to 30 FTE in the next 12 to 18 months and overseeing our hiring process.

• Proactively identify bottlenecks before they slow research down and rapidly design and implement solutions whether thats streamlining hiring improving team processes or connecting researchers with the support they need.

• Streamline interactions between and the rest of enabling our communications and operations team to better support and our team to develop strategic communication events and grantmaking initiatives.

• Ensure our work has real-world impact through deepening our relationships with leading AI companies (e.g. red-teaming) and government departments (e.g. threat assessment research contracts).

• Mentor individuals doing deep technical work; however we expect this role to have minimal IC or engineering focused work.

This role would be a great fit if you:

• Love helping talented individuals reach their full potential.

• Enjoy working with mission-driven colleagues to achieve real-world impact.

• Like being in an intellectually curious environment.

• Enjoy building and scaling high-impact and high-performing teams

• Want to work with a range of governments leading AI companies and academics. Were a lean organization and seek to leverage our impact through strategic partnerships.

This role would be a poor fit if you:

• Want to lead a research direction or make direct technical contributions. This is primarily a management role but do check out our other more technical roles.

• Want to do significant amounts of engineering in your day to day work.

• Wish to operate within clearly defined bounds. Were planning to double in size in the next 12-18 months and will change a lot as an organization. There will be no shortage of opportunities but navigating uncertainty is a core part of the role.

• Want an equity upside or value compensation above all else. Were a non-profit: we aim to pay competitively but if this is the most important factor for you there are other organisations better suited to your priorities.

About You

To be a strong candidate for the Head of Engineering (Research) role you likely:

• Have at least 3 years experience managing technical teams including some experience managing managers. We expect most candidates will have more experience than this (typically 5 years often 10) but we value a track record of impactful outcomes and potential above simply number of years.

• Have thrived in rapidly evolving environments and successfully executed on pivots such as in a start-up rapidly growing team at a larger company or in a research environment.

• Bring technical intuition from past hands-on work as an individual contributor. Its OK if youre rusty or the experience was outside AI: you dont need to be actively coding but you should understand how technical projects unfold and be able to read one of our research papers or design documents understand the technical approach and grasp what might be slowing down progress.

• Can effectively communicate novel methods and solutions to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Have an interest in making AI trustworthy and secure.

It is preferable if you:

• Designed and refined hiring processes for technical positions.

• Have some prior experience operating in a research environment.

• Have some familiarity working with large language models.

Logistics

If based in the USA you will be an employee of a 501(c)(3) research non-profit. Outside the USA you will be an employee of an EoR organisation on behalf of .

• Location: Both remote (global at least 3-5 hours of overlap with Pacific time) and in-person (Berkeley CA) are possible. We sponsor US visas for US-based employees and can also hire remotely in most countries.

• Hours: Full-time (40 hours/week).

• Compensation: $200000-$350000/year depending on experience and location with the potential for additional compensation for exceptional candidates. We will also pay for work-related travel and equipment expenses. We offer catered lunch and dinner at our offices in Berkeley.

• Application process: Apply by submitting a CV and a one paragraph description of why youre interested in working with us. From there youll be invited to a short phone screen to assess mutual fit a paid test task to provide feedback on some of our past work three one-hour interviews covering management technical mentorship and your technical background; and a paid full-day interview.

We know these roles are rare and the skill combination is unusual. If youre uncertain whether your background fits but are excited by the mission and challenges we encourage you to apply were looking for excellence and potential not a perfect resume match.

If you have any questions about the role please do get in touch at .

Otherwise if you dont have questions the best way to ensure a proper review of your skills and qualifications is by applying directly via the application form. Please dont email us to share your resume (it wont have any impact on our decision). Thank you!

Required Experience:

Director