[Hiring] Co-Founder @Responsible AIxBio Collaborative

Role Description

R-ABC needs a co-founder. We've built a two-year plan, secured initial funding, and have about ten workstreams launching by the middle of next year. Now we need someone to help lead what comes next.

• Share leadership, genuinely
• Own decisions and consequences:
  • Make real calls across strategy, stakeholders, hiring, and positioning, and carry the weight when they don't work.
• Be a thought partner:
  • Pressure-test thinking, offer a second read on hard calls, and be available for the unstructured back-and-forth that makes decisions better.
• Divide work in the moment:
  • Look at what's coming this week, decide together who takes what, and own your half without waiting for it to be formally assigned.
• Build the field
  • Convene the stakeholders:
    • Help bring together the world’s most influential frontier AIxBio companies to encourage, enable, and catalyze their safety work.
  • Build the governance foundation:
    • Shape the standards, best practices, and shared resources that AI x bio governance currently lacks. Very little of this exists yet.
  • Represent Responsible AIxBio Collaborative externally:
    • Hold relationships with stakeholder organizations, funders, policymakers, and the broader AI and biosecurity community.
  • Read the landscape:
    • Analyze and forecast where the technology and the policy environment are going, and adjust what we're doing accordingly.
• Stand up the work
  • Take workstreams end to end:
    • Own several of the workstreams coming online, including ones that don't exist yet and need to be built from zero.
  • Spot what's missing:
    • Notice the gaps nobody has named and either fill them or flag them.
  • Trade off honestly:
    • Help decide what the Responsible AIxBio Collaborative does, and just as importantly what it declines, while the desire to do everything is strongest.
• Build the organization
  • Hire the early team:
    • Help find, assess, and close the people who'll define what this place is.
  • Set the culture deliberately:
    • Work with the Executive Director and Chief of Staff to put Responsible AIxBio Collaborative's values into words early.
  • Scale past yourselves:
    • Help move Responsible AIxBio Collaborative from founder-led execution to something that runs without either of you in every room.

Qualifications

• You've operated at this level: You've held senior leadership responsibility somewhere, and you know what it takes.
• You care about growing people: Mentoring early hires into future leaders matters to you, not as a management technique but as something you actually believe in.
• You're hands on, especially early: Right now there's no team to delegate to. You're doing the actual work, not just directing it.
• You want to build, not inherit: You're looking for the version of this where the org chart, the strategy, and the culture are still unwritten.
• You disagree productively: You'll challenge the Executive Director's thinking, defend your own, and change your mind when you're wrong.
• You know this landscape: You have credibility and relationships in AI, biosecurity, technology policy, or an adjacent field. The Executive Director covers bio, so depth on the AI side is especially valuable.
• You're mission-driven: You care about the outcome here enough to take on the risk of an organization that is a few months old.
• You can hold uncertainty: Responsible AIxBio Collaborative is small, new, and operating in a field that changes monthly. Priorities will shift.

Nice to Haves

• Founding experience: You've started an organization, a program, or a major initiative and seen it through the ugly middle part.
• Multi-stakeholder convening: You've brought competing organizations to a table and gotten something useful out of it.
• Technical fluency: You can engage substantively with people building AI systems or working in the life sciences, without needing everything translated.
• Fundraising: You've raised philanthropic or institutional money, or you're willing to learn fast.
• Policy and standards work: You've been part of building standards, frameworks, or governance structures somewhere they didn't previously exist.
• Distributed leadership: You've led across time zones and have opinions about what makes that work.

What Success Looks Like

• The world is a safer place: AIxBio leaders are directly reducing risk, best practices and norms are spreading, and policymakers are acting to build and solidify oversight based on our efforts.
• The bottleneck moves: Decisions stop waiting on one person's bandwidth.
• Decisions get better: Not just faster. Two people arguing well produce better calls than one person deciding alone.
• Coverage doubles: Responsible AIxBio Collaborative shows up in twice as many rooms, with twice the relationships, without losing coherence.
• The org outgrows its founders: A year in, Responsible AIxBio Collaborative functions as an institution rather than as one person's project.

Salary and Working Arrangement

Compensation for this role is expected to range from $185,000-$260,000, depending on experience and qualifications. Responsible AIxBio Collaborative is fully remote with no offices. We provide an allowance for a home office setup or co-working space, whichever you prefer. We're open to candidates outside the US, though we have a slight preference for US-based for this role given the nature of the work. All else equal, we're happy to work across time zones for the right person.

Interview Process

• Application review: Our recruiting partner reviews every application.
• Screening conversation (20 minutes): A call with our recruiting partner covering your background, what you're looking for, and what this role involves day to day.
• Conversation with the Executive Director: A discussion with Ryan Ritterson, Responsible AIxBio Collaborative's founder, about the work, the field, and how you think.
• Final conversations: A conversation with a senior reviewer from Sentinel Bio, our founding funder, to bring an additional perspective into the decision.