Technical Director of AI Safety

The role

This senior leadership role provides technical leadership for AI safety work at the Foundation Labs. You will own the technical strategy, lead an R&D team, and shape international AI safety debates.

What you will do

• Owning the technical strategy for AI Safety by determining research directions and building technologies to mitigate risks.
• Leading a high-performing R&D team through hiring, mentorship, and culture cultivation.
• Driving academic impact by guiding machine learning projects and securing top-tier publications.
• Shaping market-leading offerings for frontier labs and security institutes.
• Overseeing technical delivery of AI safety and security projects.
• Representing Faculty externally as a primary technical voice and delivering thought leadership.
• Collaborating cross-functionally with business unit directors and commercial teams.

Required qualifications

• Proven track record of designing and leading high-performing technical teams.
• Ability to manage R&D budgets and mentor senior technical staff.
• Deep expertise in AI safety research regarding alignment, interpretability, and robustness in LLMs or safety-critical systems.
• Strong scientific background evidenced by high-impact machine learning publications.
• Comprehensive understanding of transformer architectures.
• Strategic visionary capable of setting research priorities.
• Compelling communicator able to synthesise complex technical concepts.
• Strong commercial acumen and stakeholder management skills.

Before you apply

• Talent Team Screen
• Hiring Manager Interview
• Technical Interview Loop
• Research Proposal
• Leadership + Principles Interview

About the company

Faculty was established in 2014 to transform performance through human-centric AI. The company works with global customers across government, finance, retail, energy, life sciences and defence.