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Salary: USD 230,000 - 280,000 / annual
Gray Swan is building AI safety infrastructure to evaluate frontier AI models for dangerous capabilities and deploy real-time threat detection systems. The company works directly with leading AI labs to reduce biological risks from increasingly capable AI systems.
As Head of Biology, you will build and lead Gray Swan's biology safety capability from the ground up, serving as the technical authority on biological misuse risk across red-teaming, evaluation, benchmarking, defenses, and safety infrastructure. This is a rare opportunity to shape an entirely new technical function at a leading AI security company, working at the intersection of synthetic biology, biosecurity, AI safety, and machine learning.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and lead adversarial evaluations of frontier LLMs for biological misuse risks, including agent acquisition, pathogen characterization and enhancement, biosecurity screening bypass, and emerging biotechnology capabilities across text, agentic, and multimodal systems.
- Partner with machine learning engineers and AI researchers to translate biological expertise into technical requirements for scalable evaluation datasets, classifiers, guardrails, benchmarks, fine-tuned models, and automated red-teaming for internal products and frontier AI lab partners.
- Develop and maintain the biological component of Gray Swan's CBRN harm taxonomy, ensuring risk frameworks evolve with rapidly advancing model capabilities.
- Produce clear technical risk assessments and actionable recommendations for frontier AI labs, enterprise customers, policymakers, and internal stakeholders.
- Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of biology subject matter experts while establishing rigorous evaluation standards, quality processes, and scalable safety infrastructure.
- Represent Gray Swan as the company's biology safety expert through collaborations with AI labs, biosecurity organizations, government partners, and the broader AI safety research community.
The company is approximately 50 people, well-funded, and growing quickly. Your work will directly influence how the world deploys AI agents and systems at scale.
REQUIREMENTS:
- PhD in biology, particularly in microbiology, virology, synthetic biology, protein engineering, or a closely related discipline, with postdoctoral or equivalent research experience.
- Deep understanding of biological misuse risks, dual-use research, pathogen biology, synthetic biology, or biosecurity.
- Experience conducting adversarial evaluations, biological risk assessments, AI safety research, or developing safety datasets for frontier AI systems.
- Familiarity with international biosecurity frameworks, dual-use governance, responsible biotechnology practices, and emerging AI safety standards.
- Comfortable operating at the intersection of cutting-edge biology, machine learning, and AI security.
- Ability to thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where you'll define strategy while building new systems from the ground up.
- Builder mentality: enjoys creating teams, processes, and technical infrastructure, not simply maintaining existing programs.
BONUS QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience developing machine learning systems, biological safety classifiers, or evaluation pipelines for high-risk biological capabilities.
- Hands-on experience with frontier AI model evaluations, red-teaming, prompt engineering, or AI capability benchmarking.
- Experience working with government biosecurity organizations, frontier AI labs, or organizations focused on catastrophic biological risk.
- Publications or significant contributions in AI safety, biosecurity, synthetic biology, or dual-use governance.
- Strong programming or data science experience (Python, ML tooling, biological data analysis).
