Senior / Principal Materials Scientist, AI Safety

Location: Cambridge, MA, USA; London, UK; or San Francisco, CA, USA. Other locations: Alewife, Cambridge, MA; Europe.

Expected base salary range: $268,000–$384,000 USD, with bonus potential and early-stage equity. USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions; international salaries are set to local market.

Company

hirify.global builds autonomous scientific AI systems and proprietary AI Science Factory instruments to accelerate discovery across medicine, materials, and energy.

What you will do

• Map misuse risks by connecting material properties, processing, functional performance, and materials applications to established and emerging harmful uses.
• Assess physical feasibility, processing complexity, manufacturing requirements, actor resources, and how AI could change constraints on misuse.
• Distinguish established capabilities, plausible future developments, and weakly supported hypotheses, updating assessments as evidence changes across models, tools, and automated laboratories.
• Identify expertise gaps, commission targeted scientific input, and synthesize specialist findings into coherent risk assessments.
• Translate dual-use judgments into policy boundaries, evaluation priorities, and mitigation requirements for beneficial materials research.
• Collaborate with threat modelers, evaluation researchers, engineering colleagues, and experimental teams to interpret red-team findings and evaluate safeguards.

Requirements

• Deep expertise, including a PhD or comparable experience, in materials science or a closely related discipline, with a strong understanding of relationships between structure, properties, processing, and applications.
• Relevant expertise may include particulate, porous, and formulated systems; structural and functional materials; thin films; electrochemical materials; and metals and alloys.
• Substantive experience assessing dual-use risks in a relevant area, including harmful applications such as nuclear proliferation, radiological misuse, weapons-related capabilities, energetics, or other consequential materials risks.
• Sound judgment regarding physical possibility, practical feasibility, and uncertainty, with the ability to investigate risks beyond an immediate specialism.
• Ability to identify appropriate specialists, evaluate technical evidence, and synthesize contributions across scientific and security disciplines.
• Clear scientific communication, independent research judgment, and the ability to collaborate across science, engineering, and policy.

Nice to have

• Experience applying materials or related physical-science expertise to AI safety through threat analysis, evaluations, red teaming, or mitigation design.
• Experience commissioning specialist research or assessing emerging technologies across disciplinary boundaries.
• Experience with computational materials science, advanced manufacturing, or automated synthesis and characterization.

Culture & Benefits

• High-agency, talent-dense AI safety team working across science, model training, lab integration, and related functions.
• U.S. full-time employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off; company-wide holidays; and paid parental leave.
• Additional U.S. benefits include educational assistance, commuter benefits including bike-share memberships for office-based employees, and a subsidized lunch program.
• Full-time employees outside the U.S. receive benefits tailored to their region.
• Core values include truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, with startup-speed execution on scientific AI safety challenges.