Most AI startups hire safety after Series B. We're hiring it at 30 people. Here's why, and what we're looking for.
The bet we're making
We treat governance and safety as the product, not a feature bolted on later. If we get them wrong — if customers can't trust the sandboxed runtime, the audit trail, the breach protocols — no customer trusts us with anything important. We lose the category.
Most competitors are betting they can safety-patch their way to SOC 2. We're betting that safety is the moat or it's nothing.
Safety isn't a layer we'll add later — it's the moat or it's nothing.
What this person owns in 90 days
Not policy papers. Shipped work:
- Incident response runbook for agent misbehavior — who gets paged, what data gets logged, when we notify customers.
- Red-team playbook — documented patterns we test for every release. Jailbreaks, sandbox escapes, hallucination-driven breach attempts.
- Safety policy library expansion — from hard-coded guardrails to declarative policies that scale with customer complexity.
- Customer-facing safety reports — audit-trail summaries, breach simulations, compliance evidence. Make customers feel the safety work.
What we look for
Production engineering chops first. We need someone who can ship code, run incident response, and think in systems. Not pure academia. Not just policy theatre.
A safety mindset means you can argue with the CEO when scope creeps dangerously, or when a customer asks for a feature that breaks containment. You say no. You have data. You sleep well.
What we don't look for
- People who only want to write papers or give talks about safety. We need hands on the code.
- People who think "AI safety" means refusal training or RLHF alignment. That's model tuning, not system safety.
- People who can't say no to a customer, or who treat safety as a compliance checkbox instead of a product lever.
Be honest about trade-offs. Safety costs velocity. Our job is to make that trade visible and defendable — not to pretend it doesn't exist.
How to apply
We read every application. Short resume, a note on why this role, what you'd ship first. Link below.
