General Interest (Senior Leadership)

Menlo Ventures; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Market competitive salary

Equity options

Competitive benefits

One remote week per month

Job summary

Goodfire is looking for senior leaders to join their San Francisco team, focusing on making advanced AI systems interpretable. Ideal candidates will have experience in building high-performing teams and navigating critical growth phases in tech.

We value ownership, constant improvement, and prioritizing the mission. This role involves shaping strategy and guiding work in a fast-moving environment, with competitive salary and benefits.

Qualifications

• Experience in building and scaling high-performing teams.
• Background in engineering, research, or organizational leadership.
• Experience in high-growth or deep tech environments.

Responsibilities

• Shape strategy and guide high-impact technical work.
• Build structure and culture for a mission-driven organization.
• Deliver results in a fast-moving environment.

Skills

Team leadership

Strategic thinking

Technical acumen in AI

Operational execution

Job description

About Goodfire

Goodfire is a research company using interpretability to understand, learn from, and design AI systems. Our mission is to build the next generation of safe and powerful AI—not by scaling alone, but by understanding the intelligence we're building.

Scaling has proven powerful, but today's approach is fundamentally limited: we can't meaningfully understand, debug, or shape what models learn. Every engineering discipline has been gated by fundamental science and AI is at that inflection point now.

We’re advancing the science of how AI systems actually work. Treating models as black boxes is an unnecessary handicap—we have access to the structures inside them, and understanding those structures lets us steer what models learn, make them safer and more useful, and extract the vast knowledge they contain. Our goal is to make AI that can be understood, debugged, and shaped like software.

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco with a team of the world’s top interpretability researchers and engineers from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind. We're backed by over $200M from B Capital, Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed, Eric Schmidt, and others.

Senior Leadership – Expression of Interest

Goodfire is tackling one of the most urgent and technically complex challenges in AI: making advanced systems interpretable and aligned. We’re looking to connect with senior leaders who’ve built and scaled high-performing teams, navigated critical growth phases, and delivered at the frontier of emerging technology.

Whether your background is in engineering, research, operations, or organizational leadership, you’ll help shape strategy, guide high-impact technical work, and build the structure and culture for a fast-moving, mission-driven organization. We’re building a lean, talent-dense team where every hire is critical and deeply trusted.

We’re especially interested in:

• Founders and early execs who’ve scaled ambitious teams
• C-suite leaders from high-growth or deep tech environments
• Technical leaders who’ve shipped novel AI systems
• Operators experienced in high-stakes, high-velocity execution

Our values

Goodfire is looking for individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We are building a team first and foremost.

Put mission and team first

All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.

Improve constantly

We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.

Take ownership and initiative

There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we’re building.

Action today

We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.

Where we work

We are hiring for this position in our San Francisco HQ. We are in person 5 days a week, with one company-wide remote week per month.

If you share our values and have relevant experience, we encourage you to apply and join us in shaping the future of how we design AI systems.

We offer market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.

More importantly, you’ll help guide a world-class team working on foundational technology at the center of ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity.