[Hiring] Incubated Founder @Convergent Research

Role Description

Advancements in AI bring both opportunities and serious risks. Atlas Computing takes on society-scale AI risks that no existing institution is built to address — we design the intervention, validate it with domain experts and funders, then recruit and empower the specialist who will own it.

You can think of us as:

• A tiger team that identifies, scopes, and launches interventions that aren't a good fit for existing organizations.
• A design studio developing and staffing product requirements docs for coordination and market failures.
• A think tank combined with whatever their analog of "tech transfer" would be.

Some of the most important problems in catastrophic AI risk need owners: leaders who identify an overlooked, high-impact, and tractable problem; develop effective interventions; and ultimately take personal responsibility for bringing those interventions into the world.

That’s why Atlas Computing is launching a selective program for people with deep domain expertise and the drive to address the most important risks facing society from growing AI capabilities. Founders will take one problem from a rough direction to a fundable plan:

• Sharpening a concrete intervention.
• Pressure-testing it against the field.
• Building the relationships and founding team to execute it.
• Leaving with a grant proposal and the backing to pursue it.

Founders will have between six months and two years to research a problem and develop a pitch, but we hold that loosely — a Founder is done when their effort is ready to stand on its own, not when a calendar says so. The goal is for Founders to develop an ambitious plan as quickly as possible (early graduations welcome), complete with conditionally committed users/stakeholders, an excellent founding team, expert advisors, and organizational plans like milestones.

Completion consists of pitching funders like Coefficient Giving and launching with an initial grant of around $10 million.

Cohort 1: Securing AI Infrastructure

While future cohorts will tackle other neglected topics in navigating transformative AI, the first cohort focuses on securing AI infrastructure. This includes keeping the frontier AI systems out of the hands of actors who would steal, poison, or misuse them.

The more powerful AI gets, the more critical it is to have strong guardrails, authorization systems, and safety mechanisms around it. However, most people working on catastrophic AI risk don’t have the necessary infosecurity experience to address these problems.

We expect transformative AI will need to be secured against threat actors like:

• Nation-states
• Terrorists
• Insider threats
• Misaligned AIs themselves

These may be the hardest, highest-stakes security problems you ever work on, and you'll be one of a very small pool of people qualified to work on them.

Examples of problems we're looking for owners on include:

• Securing AI from exfiltration: protecting model weights and algorithms from theft.
• Securing AI integrity: protecting models from tampering via data poisoning or other attacks.
• Enabling verification of AI datacenter properties: demonstrations that would allow verifiable attestations that a data center is being used for inference or alignment research, rather than training.
• Adjacent problems in AI infrastructure security (e.g., disconnected model safety, secure compute verification, protocols for using compromised AI, detecting and responding to rogue deployments) may also be in scope where they bear on keeping frontier models secure.

Success looks like:

• Sharpened a rough direction into a concrete intervention, with attestations from domain experts that it's plausible and from decision-makers that it would change their behavior.
• Built the relationships and founding team needed to execute it.
• Produced a grant proposal in partnership with an interested donor we’ll introduce.

Joining the incubator does not guarantee funding for your project, but the goal of the program is to develop plans funders are excited to scale. If there's not a mutually satisfactory project to scale up, we'll support you in finding your next role.

Outcomes we'd be excited about:

• You become the founder and/or directly responsible individual (DRI) of an object-level intervention.
• You become a grantmaker or “general manager” of grantmakers directing serious capital across this field.
• You become the advisor, mentor, and recruiter for the next wave of AI risk founders in this field.

Founders and Field Strategists

Atlas is also hiring Field Strategists, and we're running both searches at once, with separate applications. The two roles are complementary.

Field Strategists map a field’s incentives and bottlenecks, identify points of leverage, and de-risk high-impact interventions across an ecosystem. Their goal is to scope promising solutions clearly enough to pitch them, identify and recruit the right founders to own them, and support the handoff from strategy to execution. The field strategist holds an ongoing position at Atlas, building the skills and praxis for this approach for multiple efforts simultaneously and in series.

Founders take a single object-level project and iterate a rough idea into a fundable, executable plan. Founders will learn and practice field strategy for one specific problem, which will become a project they will remain responsible for and transition out of Atlas.

Upon joining Atlas, you're not locked in: a Founder who realizes their strength is ecosystem strategy can switch tracks, and vice versa.

Qualifications

• Experience working on cybersecurity in a national security context (especially building SL5 facilities, intelligence, or offensive security).
• Experience in ML security research (tamper resistance, backdoors, password locking).
• Experience in a relevant industry context — e.g., at a frontier AI lab, or in security at a hyperscaler, hardware company, or government contractor.
• Exceptional capability in a relevant area — e.g., academic security research, security entrepreneurship, developing security standards, or AI hardware or firmware.
• You break down ambiguous problems into clear next steps, and don't get overwhelmed when you lack guidance.
• You can clearly articulate your plans, verbally and in writing, to coordinate and motivate others.

Requirements

• A practice of reviewing the state-of-the-art after having an idea, coupled with an urge to prototype, test, and iterate.
• Experience coordinating and aligning stakeholders to work toward a common goal.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.
• Comfort with uncertainty and interest in shaping our culture, as we're still a very small organization.
• A strong compulsion to do something about AI risk — you understand what it would mean to be responsible for mitigating a particular risk from AI, and you want it anyway (because no one else is).
• The ability and inclination to do this work (to some extent) without Atlas, but you believe the program’s network, expertise, and institutional support would substantially decrease the difficulty, increase your odds of success, and/or scale your enjoyment while doing it.

Benefits

• $150,000 - $250,000 a year.
• More senior candidates may be eligible for higher than this maximum salary.
• Location: Remote, with many calls in Pacific Time.
• Preference for candidates based in the US.
• Travel: likely ~20% travel.

Company Description

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.