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're a small technical team, we move fast, and we're growing quickly this year.
The mission
Plausibly the most difficult, urgent, and interesting challenge in AI security engineering this decade (for humans, at least): designing the first datacenter purpose-built to Security Level 5, the standard for defending frontier labs against attackers with nation-state resources and billion-dollar budgets. We wrote v0.1 with input from frontier-lab CISOs and US security and intelligence officials. Now we're designing SL5 architectures for real AI workloads and standing up the reference stack to guide lab buildouts. First SL5 components this year, at-scale build in 2027. The stack has to hold against nation-states, keep researchers productive, stay within what labs can pay, and ship in 2-3 years.
The role
Lead the SL5 standard end to end. It's a NIST SP 800-53 overlay, with physical requirements from ICD 705, supply chain from NIST 800-161, across five streams: network, physical, machine, personnel, supply chain. The current version is a v0.1 draft with open questions and a roadmap of mappings (DoD IL6, FedRAMP High, CNSSI 1253). Keep it technically coherent and drive it from draft to something labs actually adopt.
What you'd do
Lead versioning, control updates, and cross-stream coherence
Find and fix flaws in the current version and drive its open questions to resolution
Extend the mappings to IL6, FedRAMP High, and CNSSI 1253, plus the AI-datacenter and AI-SCIF overlays to ICD 705
Gather lab, datacenter operator, chip provider, and government feedback, and translate their constraints back into the standard
Make the required-vs-recommended-vs-deferred calls where security and adoptability conflict
Set the writing and editorial bar for a document read by both deeply technical and senior policy audiences
You'd fit if you
Have authored, owned, or led a technical standard, control framework, or comparable cross-cutting spec, ideally one real organizations had to implement
Have deep security experience in more than one of: systems/network, physical/personnel, hardware/ML infra, government security frameworks
Are fluent with NIST 800-53 / ICD 705 / IL6-class frameworks
Write clearly and precisely for technical and policy readers
Want your work to set the bar the whole industry builds to
Bonus
Wrote or operated under classified or high-sensitivity frameworks
Hold a clearance or are clearance-eligible
Have standing relationships across frontier labs, the IC, or datacenter/chip supply chains
Owned a standard that had to be both secure and adoptable under real cost and speed pressure
Logistics
Bay Area, in-person. Base salary $200,000-240,000. We may pay exceptional or highly experienced hires more. Full benefits: healthcare, dental, vision, 401k match, and more.
Skills Required
- Authored, owned, or led a technical standard, control framework, or comparable cross-cutting specification
- Deep security experience across multiple domains (systems/network, physical/personnel, hardware/ML infrastructure, government security frameworks)
- Fluency with NIST SP 800-53, ICD 705, and IL6-class frameworks
- Ability to write clearly and precisely for both technical and senior policy audiences
- Experience translating lab, datacenter operator, chip provider, and government constraints into standards
- Willingness and ability to work Bay Area in-person
- Experience making required vs recommended vs deferred determinations balancing security and adoptability
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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