About Security Level 5
Security Level 5 is a Bay Area AI security nonprofit working with AI labs and US intelligence agencies to defend frontier models from priority nation-state-level threats. We move fast, and we're tripling headcount this year.
The Mission
We're hiring for what's plausibly the most difficult, urgent, and interesting challenge in AI security engineering this decade (for humans, at least): designing and building the first datacenter purpose-built to Security Level 5, the standard for defending frontier AI labs against attackers with the resources of a nation-state and billion-dollar budgets. We're working on the first SL5 components this year and aiming for an at-scale SL5 datacenter build in 2027.
We wrote the first version of the standard with input from CISOs and senior security staff at the frontier labs, and US security and intelligence officials. Now we're designing the SL5 architectures purpose-built for frontier AI workloads, and standing up the reference tech stack to guide labs' buildouts. This stack has to hold against nation-states, not destroy researchers' productivity, not cost more than labs can pay, and ship in 2-3 years.
What you’d work on
Ensuring our standardization efforts are in line with norms and capabilities of the auditing industry.
Maintaining relationships with key industry stakeholders,
Helping our builds strike a balance between critical security properties and auditability.
You’d be a fit if you
Have experience with real-world auditing
Develop auditing protocols that adequately capture what it takes to declare an implementation nation-state-level secure. This likely will involve performance-based requirements (eg. pentesting requirements) more so than checklist requirements.
Can employ a security mindset to find robust and efficient methods to ensure compliance with controls.
Logistics
Bay Area, in-person. This role's base salary range is $140,000 - $230,000 USD per year. We may be open to paying exceptional and/or highly experienced employees more than this. We also provide full benefits, including healthcare, dental, vision, 401k match, and more.
Skills Required
- Experience with real-world auditing
- Develop auditing protocols for nation-state-level security, including performance-based requirements (e.g., pentesting)
- Security-minded approach to ensure compliance with controls
- Maintain relationships with key industry stakeholders
- Design systems that balance critical security properties and auditability
- Work in-person in the Bay Area
What We Do
Security Level 5 is a Bay Area 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on protecting frontier AI models from priority nation-state threats. It develops the technical roadmap, security standard, architectures, and reference stack for “SL5”—defenses spanning machine, physical, network, personnel, and supply-chain security. The organization convenes AI labs, national-security leaders, engineers, data-center operators, chip providers, researchers, and government participants to make high-assurance AI infrastructure deployable.
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