About this role
About Goodfire
Goodfire is an AI interpretability research lab. We build interpretability agents and infrastructure to understand, monitor, and align AI models.
We believe that AI is the most consequential technology of our time. Yet AI models are trained by trial and error today, with limited understanding of what drives their behavior. Our goal is to advance the research and technology needed to fully understand and align AI so humanity can trust superintelligence.
Goodfire is a public benefit corporation founded by researchers who helped pioneer the field of interpretability at OpenAI and Google DeepMind. We are headquartered in San Francisco and have raised over $200M from leading investors including Lightspeed, Menlo, and B Capital.
About the role
We’re looking for our first security hire to own security across our infrastructure, product, and company. The security landscape is changing daily as AI gets more capable, and we need to protect ourselves against sophisticated, fast-evolving threats.
This is a foundational, hands-on role. We need a strong engineer who stays on top of new vulnerabilities and attacks, responds quickly when one could affect us, and understands how the threat model is evolving. You’ll help define what security looks like for an AI research lab, working closely with our research, engineering, and operations teams.
Key responsibilities
- Incident and vulnerability response: track new exploits, supply chain risks, and third-party breaches as they go public, then assess our exposure and fix it fast.
- Access and credentials: limit what people, services, and AI agents can reach, with short-lived credentials and tightly managed API keys.
- Monitoring and detection: logging and alerting across our cloud, clusters, network, and SaaS tools.
- Product security: keep our product secure as we build and ship new features.
- Infrastructure security: secure our cloud, GPU clusters, and agent sandboxes.
- Security operations: SSO, MFA, and endpoint security.
What you'll bring
Required experience
- 5+ years in security engineering, with hands-on ownership of cloud and infrastructure security.
- Strong software engineering skills and experience building security tooling.
- Experience running incident response and vulnerability management.
- Strong grasp of AI security, including how AI agents change the threat model and how to use them in security work.
- Willingness and humility to own anything security-related yourself, big or small.
Preferred qualifications
- Startup experience or building a security program from scratch.
- Experience securing ML research infrastructure or sandboxes for AI agents.
- Experience with application and product security.
- Corporate security experience: SSO, MFA, and endpoint management.
Our values
Goodfire is looking for individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We are building a team first and foremost.
Put mission and team first
All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.
Improve constantly
We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.
Take ownership and initiative
There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we're building.
Action today
We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.
Where we work
We are hiring for this position in our San Francisco HQ. We are in person 5 days a week, with one company-wide remote week per month.
What we offer
This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.
The expected salary range for this position is $250,000 to $500,000 USD.
This role reports to our CTO.
Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to join a vital mission at an important point in its trajectory. We are developing groundbreaking technology with a world-class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity. If you want to do your life's work with us, even if you believe you do not meet every single requirement, apply now.