Partner, AI Resilience

Convergent Research; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Convergent Research seeks a senior leader to own and drive a growing portfolio of focused research organizations (FROs) and science projects focused on AI resilience. You will define the portfolio, recruit founders, and shape strategic direction to ensure transformative impact while balancing safety and efficacy.

You’ll work with funders, form strong theses, raise capital, and guide boards to make hard strategic decisions.

Responsibilities

• Roadmap the AI resilience landscape to identify bottlenecks and keystone capabilities for building organizations around
• Source and diligence ideas for new projects and design funding calls with funders
• Build founding teams and recruit early hires who will make or break projects
• Coach founders on technical and organizational roadmaps, fundraising, and startup operations

Job description

Convergent Research is a nonprofit science studio best known for pioneering the Focused Research Organization (FRO): purpose-built, mission-driven orgs designed to solve technological bottlenecks, unlock whole new fields, and lead to scaled revolutions. We’ve proven our model works by building over 14 high-impact scientific organizations spanning AI, biotech, mathematics, climate science, and more.

AI capability is compounding faster than the world's ability to absorb it. Other technologies got decades to sort out their safety codes, their testing regimes, and the institutions that enforce them. We don't have decades. The defenses have to be built while the technology is still moving, and there's no budget line anywhere that says build the defenses now.

That's the gap this role exists to close. Not "how do we build another AI company" - plenty of people are doing that. This role is about building the missing institutions and technical infrastructure that make the world resilient to advanced AI: the defensive capabilities that won't be built by a startup, won't fit inside an academic lab, and are too important to leave to chance.

What you’ll do

Partners at Convergent are like senior partners at a venture incubator. You'll create and fully own a growing portfolio of FROs and other scientific projects that advance AI resilience - society's capacity to capture AI's benefits while withstanding its risks.

The portfolio is yours to define, but the surface area is much bigger than model safety alone. It spans defensive biosecurity (pathogen-agnostic detection, next-generation PPE, rapid countermeasures), provably secure cyber-physical systems and formal verification, epistemic infrastructure for a world flooded with AI-generated content, independent evaluation and monitoring capacity, compute governance, economic modeling of the transition - and areas nobody has named yet. The unifying question: what keystone defensive capability, if it existed, would make the world meaningfully harder to break?

You will have extreme latitude to decide what your portfolio should include, and the resources to go build it.

You’ll form strong theses, find extraordinary founders, pressure-test ideas, raise money, build boards, launch organizations, and help them move with the speed and focus of the best deep-tech startups.

Specifically, you will:

• Roadmap the AI resilience landscape to identify the bottlenecks and keystone capabilities worth building organizations around
• Source and diligence ideas for new projects and organizations and design funding calls in partnership with funders
• Build founding teams and help recruit the early hires who will make or break them
• Directly contribute to and coach founders on technical and organizational roadmaps, fundraising, and standing up startup ops from zero
• Serve as a Director on multiple FRO boards, keeping teams on track against milestones and helping founders make the genuinely hard calls on funding, strategic direction, hiring,