Engineering Manager, Preparedness

Details

The Preparedness Engineering team builds and operates safeguards for frontier model risks, enabling advanced capabilities while detecting and limiting harm.

The role involves leading a team that builds software systems to detect and prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI models before incidents occur. You will lead engineers delivering production services, detection pipelines, and mitigation mechanisms that protect frontier model integrity and reduce high-severity misuse risk. The role requires a software engineering foundation and the ability to build reliable systems operating at billions-of-users scale.

This position is based in San Francisco, California, with a hybrid work model requiring three days in the office per week.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of software engineers building detection and mitigation systems for frontier model harms.
• Set the technical roadmap and execution strategy by prioritizing, designing, shipping, iterating, and measuring impact.
• Build production systems, including services, pipelines, tooling, instrumentation, and automation that scale with frontier model usage.
• Partner with Research and Product to translate evolving model capabilities into concrete tests, signals, and mitigations that can be deployed at scale.
• Drive strong engineering fundamentals, including architecture, reliability, monitoring, performance, and operational excellence.
• Hire and grow an exceptional team across backend, data systems, and applied machine learning engineering domains as needed.
• Anticipate what breaks at scale as agentic workflows become more capable.

Requirements

• Significant experience leading engineering teams and delivering production systems end-to-end.
• Strong technical judgment in system design, distributed systems, data pipelines, observability, and operational reliability.
• Demonstrated ability to partner cross-functionally with Research, Product, and Security to ship systems that materially reduce risk or abuse at scale.
• Experience building systems in adversarial, fast-evolving environments.
• Ability to thrive in high-context environments and work comfortably with ambiguity and novelty.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to build trust quickly with senior stakeholders while remaining pragmatic, collaborative, and calm under scrutiny.
• A background in autonomy, high-scale real-time systems, or intelligence-adjacent technical domains is a plus.

Benefits

• Base salary of $445,000–$510,000 per year, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health and dependent care expenses, as well as commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.