Engineering Manager, Preparedness

The Preparedness Engineering team is responsible for building and operating safeguards for frontier model risks, to safely enable advanced capabilities while detecting and limiting harm. The role leads a team building software systems that detect and prevent harmful misuse of frontier AI models before incidents occur. This is a builder's role: leading engineers shipping production services, detection pipelines, and mitigation mechanisms that protect frontier model integrity and reduce high-severity misuse risk. The role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week.

Responsibilities

Lead a team of software engineers building detection + mitigation systems for frontier model harms; Set the technical roadmap and execution strategy: prioritize, design, ship, iterate, measure impact; Build production systems: services, pipelines, tooling, instrumentation, and automation that scale with frontier model usage; Partner deeply 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: architecture, reliability, monitoring, performance, and operational excellence; Hire and grow an exceptional team across backend, data systems, and applied ML 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/Security to ship systems that materially reduce risk or abuse at scale; Software engineering foundation; Experience building systems in adversarial, fast-evolving environments; Thrive in high context environments; Comfortable with ambiguity and novelty; Communicate clearly and build trust quickly with senior stakeholders, pragmatic, collaborative, and calm under scrutiny

Nice to have

Background in autonomy, high-scale real-time systems, or intelligence-adjacent technical domains

Benefits

Relocation assistance to new employees