Standards Researcher

About Security Level 5

Security Level 5 is a Bay Area AI security nonprofit working with AI labs and US intelligence agencies to defend frontier models from priority nation-state-level threats. We move fast, and we're tripling headcount this year.

The Mission

We're hiring for what's plausibly the most difficult, urgent, and interesting challenge in AI security engineering this decade (for humans, at least): designing and building the first datacenter purpose-built to Security Level 5, the standard for defending frontier AI labs against attackers with the resources of a nation-state and billion-dollar budgets. We're working on the first SL5 components this year and aiming for an at-scale SL5 datacenter build in 2027.

We wrote the first version of the standard with input from CISOs and senior security staff at the frontier labs, and US security and intelligence officials. Now we're designing the SL5 architectures purpose-built for frontier AI workloads, and standing up the reference tech stack to guide labs' buildouts. This stack has to hold against nation-states, not destroy researchers' productivity, not cost more than labs can pay, and ship in 2-3 years.

What you'd work on

Researching the open questions behind individual controls: what the control should require, whether existing literature and industry practice already solve it, and what evidence an auditor would need.

Drafting control text and overlay content, and maintaining it as the standard revises.

Supporting the Standards Lead in stakeholder engagement and writing up what those conversations settle.

You'd be a fit if you

Have done security research or standards work and can read primary sources (NIST, ICD 705, vendor documentation) and synthesize them.

Write clearly and precisely under editorial pressure.

Are comfortable leaving a question open and flagged rather than resolving it prematurely.

Logistics

Bay Area, in-person. This role's base salary range is $140,000 - $200,000 USD per year. We may be open to paying exceptional and/or highly experienced employees more than this. We also provide full benefits, including healthcare, dental, vision, 401k match, and more.