Research Manager, Biological Safety

Responsibilities

• Manage, coach, and grow research scientists and engineers working on biological safety evaluations and classifiers, including hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development.
• Set the technical direction and roadmap for the biological safety research agenda; make prioritization and launch-readiness decisions.
• Own capability evaluations assessing frontier models’ biological capabilities and translate results into deployment recommendations.
• Guide training and evaluation dataset development for safety classifiers using realistic threat models.
• Oversee classifier training and iteration, optimizing adversarial robustness and low false-positive rates.
• Invest in tooling and pipelines for fast, repeatable evaluation and classifier development.
• Establish measurement of classifier and evaluation performance against production traffic; identify gaps and prioritize improvements.
• Direct red-teaming and stress-testing as threats, models, and product surfaces evolve.
• Partner with Research, Product, Policy, and government affairs teams on biological safety throughout the model lifecycle.
• Represent the work in model cards, blog posts, and policy documents.
• Track developments in biology, machine learning, and biosecurity for emerging risks and mitigations.

Requirements

• Experience managing a technical team, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Experience setting technical direction and prioritizing under uncertainty.
• Proficiency in Python, scientific programming, and data analysis.
• Strong understanding of machine learning fundamentals sufficient to review evaluation design and classifier development.
• Knowledge of modern biology, including high-throughput assays, functional characterization, gene synthesis, genome editing, strain construction, and protein engineering.
• Experience designing quantitative experiments or evaluations and drawing defensible conclusions from noisy results.
• Strong analytical and technical writing skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to nontechnical stakeholders.
• Familiarity with dual-use research and biosecurity frameworks, including select agent regulations, the Biological Weapons Convention, or Australia Group guidelines.
• Comfort with ambiguity and shifting priorities.

Nice-to-haves

• 3+ years of people management experience, ideally leading research scientists, research engineers, or ML engineers.
• Experience building a team or function from a small headcount.
• At least 8 years of hands-on life sciences experience, with deep expertise in molecular biology, drug discovery, or computational biology.
• Experience with large language models, including prompting, fine-tuning, or evaluation.
• Experience training or deploying production classifiers or other ML systems, including reasoning about precision and recall for rare, high-consequence categories.
• Experience developing ML methods for biological systems or biological data.
• Familiarity with adversarial robustness, red-teaming, or ML safety evaluation.
• Experience leading complex technical projects across multiple stakeholder groups.

Compensation

• Annual salary: $405,000–$485,000 USD.