Head of Engineering (Research)

FAR.AI is seeking a Head of Engineering (Research) to scale one of the world's leading AI safety research teams through a critical growth phase. You will instill excellent people and project management systems to enable our team to rapidly test and iterate on new ideas while maintaining high quality. You will scale the team from three to five research pods, expanding from 15 to 30 technical staff. You will be the key glue that streamlines internal partnerships with other FAR.AI divisions, and manage key relationships with external stakeholders we work with including leading AI companies and government AI safety institutes. We expect this role’s primary focus to be building, managing, and scaling (90%) the technical team with minimal individual contributor (IC) or engineering focused work (10%). This role would be perfect for an experienced technical leader looking to work in an impact-driven environment.

About Us

FAR.AI is a non-profit AI research institute dedicated to ensuring advanced AI is safe and beneficial for everyone. Our mission is to facilitate breakthrough AI safety research, advance global understanding of AI risks and solutions, and foster a coordinated global response.

Since our founding in July 2022, we've grown quickly to 30+ staff, producing over 40 influential academic papers, and establishing leading AI Safety events. Our work is recognized globally, with publications at premier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR, and features in the Financial Times, Nature News and MIT Technology Review.

We drive practical change through red-teaming with frontier model developers and government institutes. Most recently, we discovered major issues with Anthropic’s latest model the same day it was released, and worked with OpenAI to safeguard their latest model. Additionally, we help steer and grow the AI safety field through developing research roadmaps with renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio; running FAR.Labs, an AI safety-focused co-working space in Berkeley housing 40 members; and supporting the community through targeted grants to technical researchers.

About FAR.Research

Our research team likes to move fast. We explore promising research directions in AI safety and scale up only those showing a high potential for impact. Unlike other AI safety labs that take a bet on a single research direction, FAR.AI aims to pursue a diverse portfolio of projects. Our model is to conduct initial investigations into a range of high-potential areas. We incubate the most promising directions through a combination of in-house research, field-building events, and targeted grants. Once the core research problems are solved, we work to scale them to a minimum viable prototype, demonstrating their validity to AI companies and governments to drive adoption.

Our current focus areas include:

• Mitigating AI deception: studying when lie detectors induce honesty or evasion, and developing model organisms for deception and sandbagging
• Evaluating and red-teaming: Conducting pre- and post-release adversarial evaluations of frontier models (e.g. Claude 4 Opus, ChatGPT Agent, GPT-5); developing novel attacks to support this work; and exploring new threat models (e.g. persuasion, tampering risks).
• Robustness: working to rigorously solve these security problems through building a science of security and robustness for AI, from demonstrating superhuman systems can be vulnerable through to scaling laws for robustness.
• Explainability: developing foundational techniques such as codebook features and AC/DC, and applying them to understand core safety problems like learned planning.

FAR.AI is one of the largest independent AI safety research institutes, and is rapidly growing with the goal of diversifying and deepening our research portfolio. For that reason, we’re seeking a Head of Engineering (Research) to manage the team, accelerate delivery, and grow the team to continue to scale our impact.

About the Role

This role is critical to FAR.AI's mission. Our research directly influences how the most capable AI systems are developed and deployed. You will determine whether we can scale fast enough to keep safety ahead of rapidly advancing AI capabilities. Beyond scaling, you will work directly with leading researchers at FAR.AI to increase the velocity of their research, and with key decisionmakers in industry and government to translate our research to tangible impact.

As the Head of Engineering (Research), you will manage FAR.AI’s research team, being responsible for our team’s delivery and execution. You will:

• Manage the leads of our research pods and engineering pod, holding them accountable for their respective pod’s progress.
• Instill excellent people and project management systems that enable researchers to iterate rapidly while maintaining rigor, including through mentorship and coaching of pod leads.
• Scale FAR.Research, growing our technical team from 15 to 30 FTE in the next 12 to 18 months and overseeing our hiring process.
• Proactively identify bottlenecks before they slow research down, and rapidly design and implement solutions – whether that's streamlining hiring, improving team processes, or connecting researchers with the support they need.
• Streamline interactions between FAR.Research and the rest of FAR.AI, enabling our communications and operations team to better support FAR.Research, and our team to develop strategic communication, events, and grantmaking initiatives.
• Ensure our work has real-world impact through deepening our relationships with leading AI companies (e.g. red-teaming) and government departments (e.g. threat assessment, research contracts).
• Mentor individuals doing deep technical work; however, we expect this role to have minimal IC or engineering focused work.

This role would be a great fit if you:

• Love helping talented individuals reach their full potential.
• Enjoy working with mission-driven colleagues to achieve real-world impact.
• Like being in an intellectually curious environment.
• Enjoy building and scaling high-impact and high-performing teams
• Want to work with a range of governments, leading AI companies, and academics. We’re a lean organization, and seek to leverage our impact through strategic partnerships.

This role would be a poor fit if you:

• Want to lead a research direction or make direct technical contributions. This is primarily a management role – but do check out our other more technical roles.
• Want to do significant amounts of engineering in your day to day work.
• Wish to operate within clearly defined bounds. We’re planning to double in size in the next 12-18 months, and will change a lot as an organization. There will be no shortage of opportunities but navigating uncertainty is a core part of the role.
• Want an equity upside, or value compensation above all else. We’re a non-profit: we aim to pay competitively, but if this is the most important factor for you, there are other organisations better suited to your priorities.

About You

To be a strong candidate for the Head of Engineering (Research) role, you likely:

• Have at least 3 years experience managing technical teams, including some experience managing managers. We expect most candidates will have more experience than this (typically 5+ years, often 10+) but we value a track record of impactful outcomes and potential above simply number of years.
• Have thrived in rapidly evolving environments and successfully executed on pivots, such as in a start-up, rapidly growing team at a larger company, or in a research environment.
• Bring technical intuition from past hands-on work as an individual contributor. It’s OK if you’re rusty or the experience was outside AI: you don't need to be actively coding, but you should understand how technical projects unfold and be able to read one of our research papers or design documents, understand the technical approach, and grasp what might be slowing down progress.
• Can effectively communicate novel methods and solutions to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Have an interest in making AI trustworthy and secure.

It is preferable if you:

• Designed and refined hiring processes for technical positions.
• Have some prior experience operating in a research environment.
• Have some familiarity working with large language models.

Logistics

If based in the USA, you will be an employee of FAR.AI, a 501(c)(3) research non-profit. Outside the USA, you will be an employee of an EoR organisation on behalf of FAR.AI.

• Location: Both remote (global, at least 3-5 hours of overlap with Pacific time) and in-person (Berkeley, CA) are possible. We sponsor US visas for US-based employees, and can also hire remotely in most countries.
• Hours: Full-time (40 hours/week).
• Compensation: $200,000-$320,000/year depending on experience and location, with the potential for additional compensation for exceptional candidates. We will also pay for work-related travel and equipment expenses. We offer catered lunch and dinner at our offices in Berkeley.
• Application process: Apply by submitting a CV and a one paragraph description of why you’re interested in working with us. From there, you’ll be invited to a short phone screen to assess mutual fit, a paid test task to provide feedback on some of our past work, three one-hour interviews covering management, technical mentorship and your technical background; and a paid full-day interview.

We know these roles are rare and the skill combination is unusual. If you're uncertain whether your background fits but are excited by the mission and challenges, we encourage you to apply – we're looking for excellence and potential, not a perfect resume match.

If you have any questions about the role, please do get in touch at talent@far.ai.

Otherwise, if you don't have questions, the best way to ensure a proper review of your skills and qualifications is by applying directly via the application form. Please don't email us to share your resume (it won't have any impact on our decision). Thank you!