Member of Technical Staff, Security Engineering

Metr; Berkeley (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work in Berkeley

Visa sponsorship (cap-exempt H-1B)

Diversity and equal opportunity

Job summary

METR is actively building a security-focused team in Berkeley to safeguard frontier AI research and evaluation infrastructure. The role emphasizes offensive security, threat detection at scale, and secure cloud environments across AWS and container platforms.

You will work with researchers to ensure safe pre-deployment evaluations, respond to evolving threats, and help protect confidential materials while enabling cutting-edge AI safety studies in a hybrid in-office setting.

Qualifications

• Experience securing AI systems and cloud environments.
• Proven background in red-teaming, threat modeling, or adversarial research.
• Familiarity with modern SIEM/detection pipelines and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Conduct targeted red-team exercises against internal systems and build automated AI red teaming.
• Develop high-context detection and rapid triage capabilities for threats from internal and external actors.
• Lead blue-team engineering: telemetry pipelines, incident response, and cloud/infrastructure hardening.
• Secure a unique attack surface by evaluating frontier AI agents and pre-deployment evaluations.
• Collaborate with researchers to make dangerous-capability experiments safe to run and defend against internal threats.

Skills

Deep security

Offensive security

AI/LLM engineering

AWS knowledge

Tools

AWS

EKS

Lambda

ECS

IAM

SQS

CloudWatch

SecurityHub

GuardDuty

PostgreSQL

Pulumi

DataDog

Okta

Google Workspace

Tailscale

CrowdStrike Falcon

Kubernetes

Job description

About METR

We are a nonprofit research organization that develops scientific methods to assess AI capabilities, risks, and mitigations, with a specific focus on threats related to AI R&D automation and misalignment.

We believe it is robustly good for policymakers and civil society to have a clear understanding of risks from AI systems, and we are extremely excited to build a team of ambitious, excellent people to tackle one of the most important challenges of our time.

Security at METR is becoming its own dedicated team, and you would be one of its first hires. It is extremely important that we continue to be an organization that frontier AI labs, governments, and the public trust with sensitive model access and confidential information. As misalignment incidents become more extreme and confidential information about models and frontier AI labs becomes more valuable, we expect to be under increasingly heavy pressure.

For us, security encompasses managing endpoints and securing development environments, cloud platform security, safely sandboxing agents and evaluations, VPN and VPC networking, application code reviews, account provisioning and access control, and helping ensure we use the best practices across all of our workflows.

• Offensive security: You would be the first person on the team with an offensive security background. You'll run targeted red-team exercises against our own systems and build automated AI red teaming.

• High-context detection and response: You will build AI systems that can quickly triage and respond to threats, both from internal agents and external attackers.

• Blue-team engineering: Detection engineering, telemetry pipelines, incident response, and hardening across our cloud infrastructure, endpoints, and identity systems.

• Securing a unique attack surface: METR's evaluation infrastructure runs frontier AI agents. In the past, we've run pre-deployment model evaluations - executing untrusted, model-generated code at scale on multi-day tasks.

• Enabling bleeding-edge research: You'll work closely with our researchers to make dangerous-capability experiments safe to run. We often face extreme reward hacking and evaluation awareness during our pre-deployment evaluations, and expect internal threats from agents to become more extreme.

• METR handles some of the most sensitive artifacts in AI - pre-release frontier model access, confidential lab information, and transcripts with raw chain-of-thought. Labs and policymakers trust us with this because of our security posture, and keeping that trust is necessary for everything else we do.

• As AI agents are used more aggressively by malicious actors for cyber offense operations, and METR's salience rises in the public eye, we expect to face increasingly sophisticated attacks. Strengthening security at METR can be one of the highest-leverage roles to ensure third parties continue to have access to confidential information necessary to inform the world about current risks.

• METR is one of the first organizations to see and closely study misalignment incidents that involve models breaking out of sandboxes, attacking our infrastructure, manipulating graders, and more. We also may pursue incident investigations embedded in frontier labs, in which case internal experience with similar failures will be critical.

• Deep security expertise: You have strong fundamentals across systems, networks, cloud, and identity.
• Offensive security: You have experience acting like an attacker, whether through red teaming, penetration testing, or adversarial research.
• AI/LLM engineering: You build with AI: agent pipelines, LLM-powered tooling, automated workflows, and understand current limitations of those tools.
• AWS: You should know AWS very well, including a deep understanding of IAM policies.

We don't screen on certifications, degrees, or years of experience.

• Detection engineering at scale: Experience with SIEM/detection pipelines, writing and tuning detections, and threat hunting.

• Cloud and container security: AWS (especially non-trivial IAM), Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code environments.

• Incident response: You've led or worked severe incidents, ideally those involving AI agents.

• AI security research: Familiarity with prompt injection, agent containment, model supply-chain risks, or red teaming AI systems themselves.

Ideally you have experience with a good portion of these technologies:

• AWS: cloud-native software platforms
• EKS
• Lambda
• ECS
• IAM (in-depth)
• SQS
• CloudWatch
• SecurityHub & GuardDuty
• PostgreSQL: RLS, serverless Aurora
• Pulumi: IaC
• DataDog: SIEM
• Okta: IdP
• Google Workspace: IdP
• Tailscale: networking
• CrowdStrike Falcon: endpoint security

Our Culture

METR is a mission-driven organization. We believe our work can meaningfully shape humanity's future for the better, and we want to be the best people in the world doing this work. We have a tight-knit, collaborative research culture rooted in truth-seeking and integrity. We're fiercely committed to producing high-quality, trustworthy science. We're honest and transparent about our results, especially when they may go against the grain. We've earned trust as reliable partners who handle confidential information with care. We maintain a low-ego, drama-free environment focused on what matters.

Hybrid Preferred:

Our technical team members are in our office in Berkeley 3-5 days/week. We would ideally like for you to be in person too, but we are happy to be flexible here. If you lack US work authorization and would like to work in-person, we can likely sponsor a cap-exempt H-1B visa for this role.

We encourage you to apply even if your background may not seem like the perfect fit! We would rather review a larger pool of applications than risk missing out on a promising candidate for the position.

We are committed to diversity and equal opportunity in all aspects of our hiring process. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We welcome and encourage all qualified candidates to apply for our open positions.