Senior / Principal Chemist, AI Safety

Location: Cambridge, MA, USA; London, UK; or San Francisco, CA, USA

Expected base salary range: $148,000–$208,000 USD annually for U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.

Company

hirify.global is building AI systems and proprietary instruments designed to execute the scientific method autonomously and accelerate discovery across medicine, materials, and energy.

What you will do

• Map chemical misuse risks across scientific models, agents, and automated experimentation.
• Assess how scientific feasibility, practical complexity, expertise, resources, and AI capabilities affect the likelihood of misuse.
• Distinguish established capabilities, plausible future developments, and weakly supported hypotheses as evidence and AI capabilities evolve.
• Identify gaps, commission specialist input, and integrate findings into defensible cross-disciplinary risk assessments.
• Translate scientific risk judgments into dual-use policy boundaries, evaluation priorities, and mitigation requirements.
• Partner with threat modelers, evaluation researchers, and mitigation teams to design assessments, interpret red-team findings, and test safeguards.

Requirements

• PhD or comparable experience in synthetic chemistry or a closely related discipline, with substantial research or applied experience.
• Expertise in relevant areas such as molecular design, medicinal chemistry, inorganic or organometallic chemistry, synthesis, process development, or formulations.
• Substantive experience assessing chemical dual-use risks, including national security, export controls, or Chemical Weapons Convention-related risk tracking.
• Strong judgment about feasibility, uncertainty, practical constraints, and the limits of available expertise.
• Ability to identify specialists, critically assess evidence, and combine findings across disciplines.
• Clear scientific communication, independent research judgment, and collaboration across science, engineering, and policy.

Nice to have

• Experience applying chemistry expertise to AI safety, threat modeling, evaluation, red-teaming, or mitigation design.
• Experience commissioning specialist research or coordinating external scientific collaborators.
• Experience with automated chemistry, scientific modeling, or translating computational findings into physical experiments.

Culture & Benefits

• Startup-speed environment focused on scientific superintelligence and high-impact research.
• Full-time U.S. employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage, life and disability insurance, flexible time off, company-wide holidays, and paid parental leave.
• Educational assistance, commuter benefits including bike-share memberships for office-based employees, and a subsidized lunch program are available in the U.S.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive benefits tailored to their region.
• Early-stage equity and bonus potential are available.