[Hiring] AI Partner @Convergent Research

Role Description

Partners at Convergent are like senior partners at a venture incubator. You'll create and fully own a growing portfolio of FROs and other scientific projects that advance AI resilience — society's capacity to capture AI's benefits while withstanding its risks.

The portfolio is yours to define, but the surface area is much bigger than model safety alone. It spans:

• Defensive biosecurity (pathogen-agnostic detection, next-generation PPE, rapid countermeasures)
• Provably secure cyber-physical systems and formal verification
• Epistemic infrastructure for a world flooded with AI-generated content
• Independent evaluation and monitoring capacity
• Compute governance
• Economic modeling of the transition
• Areas nobody has named yet

The unifying question: what keystone defensive capability, if it existed, would make the world meaningfully harder to break?

You will have extreme latitude to decide what your portfolio should include, and the resources to go build it. You’ll form strong theses, find extraordinary founders, pressure-test ideas, raise money, build boards, launch organizations, and help them move with the speed and focus of the best deep-tech startups.

Specifically, you will:

• Roadmap the AI resilience landscape to identify the bottlenecks and keystone capabilities worth building organizations around
• Source and diligence ideas for new projects and organizations and design funding calls in partnership with funders
• Build founding teams and help recruit the early hires who will make or break them
• Directly contribute to and coach founders on technical and organizational roadmaps, fundraising, and standing up startup ops from zero
• Serve as a Director on multiple FRO boards, keeping teams on track against milestones and helping founders make the genuinely hard calls on funding, strategic direction, hiring, firing, and operations
• Represent Convergent externally, building high-trust relationships with the philanthropic and public funders now committing serious capital to AI resilience
• Contribute to Convergent-wide initiatives like our Founder Retreats and Residencies

Qualifications

• You understand the AI landscape of 2026 in granular detail: who is building what, why, and on what timeline
• You have a view on where that leaves the rest of the world exposed, and which of those exposures are tractable and through what clever ideas and technical methods they might be patchable, and who are the people developing those ideas
• You have ideas, or a credible plan to find ideas, for large-scale efforts that would measurably improve how the world weathers this transition
• You can argue passionately for a thesis about where philanthropic capital should go, and then argue the other side just as well
• You're technically fluent in frontier AI, enough to tell a real bottleneck from a fashionable one
• You have a deep network in the field and people pick up when you call
• You know how startups actually work, probably because you’ve worked at one, or at a venture firm, or built something yourself
• You’ve raised money, owned a budget, written technical roadmaps, and hired people
• You’ve assembled a group of people to do a hard technical thing, and it worked
• You’ve spent time around boards, governance, or nonprofit leadership
• You communicate clearly and you move fast

Requirements

• It’s okay if you don’t meet every single criterion above perfectly.
• If you've read this far, and you're already sketching the organization you'd build first, we want to hear from you.

Benefits

• A rare chance to build institutional architecture for frontier science alongside some of the sharpest people working across a dozen fields
• Competitive salary, with a range of $200,000 - $350,000.
• Up to a 6% 401k match because future-you deserves comfort
• Top-tier medical, dental, and vision insurance—majority of options are fully covered for you and your dependents
• Company-paid life insurance, AD&D, long- and short-term disability insurance, as well as voluntary supplemental insurance options
• 19 holidays (including a full week off at the end of the year—yes, we enforce it)
• 3 weeks PTO with tenure increases, with separate allotments for sick and parental leave
• Generous fertility benefits and childcare reimbursement
• Education and professional development benefits
• Wellness allowance for fitness and wellness activities
• 3x/year offsite team retreats and additional opportunities to meet your teammates in person