Head of Engineering (Frontier Safety)

Location: Remote globally. The role requires timezone flexibility across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. US or Singapore visa sponsorship is available for in-person employees.

Salary: $225,000–$350,000/year depending on experience and location, with potential additional compensation for exceptional candidates.

Company

hirify.global is a nonprofit AI research institute focused on AI safety, frontier model testing, red-teaming, evaluations, safeguards, and research for governments and leading AI companies.

What you will do

• Build and scale the engineering function for the Frontier Safety division, starting with a small team and expanding it over time.
• Develop red-teaming tools, evaluation systems, vulnerability databases, statistical analysis tools, reporting infrastructure, products, services, and agents.
• Build secure sandboxing and infrastructure for frontier AI evaluations, loss-of-control testing, CBRN and cyber evaluations, and safeguards research.
• Design systems that support external contributions, ecosystem integrations, privacy compliance, and reduced vulnerability exposure.
• Manage, mentor, and recruit engineers and future engineering managers while establishing high standards for velocity, rigor, judgment, and impact.
• Translate division strategy into scalable engineering plans, remove bottlenecks, and connect engineering systems with testing, research, partnerships, and real-world impact.

Requirements

• Strong track record in software engineering, AI, or another computer engineering discipline such as cybersecurity or MLOps.
• Strong experience managing, growing, and leading technical teams, including building startups from 0 to 1 and managing managers in scale-ups.
• Experience with parts of the stack, including coding agents, Python, LLM APIs, local LLM frameworks, evaluation frameworks, LLM agents, cloud infrastructure, compute clusters, Kubernetes, or Slurm; full-stack coverage is not required.
• Experience thriving in rapidly evolving environments and navigating shifting threat models and defenses.
• Demonstrated mission and impact orientation, with a desire to affect the safety and deployment of frontier AI systems.
• Ability to communicate technical solutions effectively to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated relentlessness in achieving ambitious goals.
• Full-time availability: 40 hours per week.

Nice to have

• Experience building, red-teaming, or evaluating frontier LLMs or agentic systems, or building safeguards for them.
• Experience building technical teams and products in an entrepreneurial environment.
• Ability to discover non-obvious, high-severity vulnerabilities in complex systems.
• Experience in adversarial ML, security, collaboration with AI labs, security teams, or government safety institutes.
• Published work in AI safety, security, or robustness.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission-driven, high-impact work measured by real-world impact rather than revenue, clicks, or publication volume.
• Fast-moving, ambiguous environment with substantial ownership and collaborative technical direction.
• Employment through hirify.global in the US, FAR.Singapore in Singapore, or an Employer of Record elsewhere.
• Work-related travel and equipment expenses are covered.
• Catered lunch and dinner are available at the Berkeley offices.

Hiring process

• Submit a CV and answers about interest in the role through the application form; do not email a resume separately.
• Selection includes a screening call, work tests, interviews, and a paid work trial.
• An alternative assessment may be available for candidates unable to participate in a work trial.