Senior Research Scientist, AI Bio Capabilities Verification
SecureBio is a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit that develops pandemic-defense capabilities and evaluates and mitigates AI-enabled biological misuse risks.
Funding history
About SecureBio
SecureBio develops pathogen-agnostic early-warning systems for novel pandemic threats and conducts frontier-AI biosecurity evaluations, benchmarks, and targeted safety-mitigation research.
Skills
About the Role
You will design and run in vitro experiments that verify how AI model performance on biology tasks holds up in the real world. You will own experimental rigor, choose safe and informative proxy systems, oversee the wet lab technical team, and turn findings into in silico correlates. You will also build demonstrations for policymakers and frontier labs and contribute to reports, papers and a public dashboard.
Requirements
- PhD in virology, molecular biology, synthetic biology, protein design or a closely related field, plus several years of post-PhD experience (or equivalent depth)
- Hands-on wet-lab depth in at least one relevant area
- Experience working with BSL-2 or higher agents
- Strong experimental design skills including power analysis, controls and confound management for small-n studies
- Calibrated judgment about biological risk
- Comfort with novel, non-standardized work and short intensive project cycles
- Commitment to research ethics, documentation and reproducibility
- Ability to handle confidential and sensitive biosecurity information
- Alignment with SecureBio's mission
- Practical experience with biological AI tools
Responsibilities
- Design and run in vitro validations of capabilities that LLMs and biological AI models demonstrate computationally
- Own experimental design rigor across verification studies, including power, controls, bias mitigation, replicability and confound management
- Translate candidate verification tasks into executable experiments with safe, informative proxy systems
- Critically assess results in the context of major threat models
- Work with the evals team to turn verification findings into in silico correlates
- Oversee the wet lab technical team in implementing and executing studies
- Contribute to specification and biological task design for AI uplift studies
- Design and execute demonstrations for policymakers and frontier labs
- Contribute to reports, papers and the public dashboard of AI biology capabilities trends
Benefits
- Health, dental and vision insurance
- Yearly mental health allowance
- Flexible work hours
- Unlimited paid time off
- Minimum 12 weeks fully-paid parental leave
- Fully-paid conference sponsorships
- Yearly development allowance
- Employer 401(k) match up to 4% of salary
- Up to 10% of salary in 401(k) contributions starting 2027
Hiring Process
Written application review, possible short work test, screening interview, possibly further interviews and/or paid trial tasks, and up to two reference checks.