Security - Member of Technical Staff

Goodfire; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 250,000 - 500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive benefits

Job summary

Goodfire, an AI interpretability lab headquartered in San Francisco, is hiring its first dedicated security engineer. You will own security across infrastructure, product, and company, staying ahead of vulnerabilities and evolving threat models in AI systems.

You’ll collaborate with research, engineering, and operations to define security posture for an AI lab. We value hands-on engineers who can implement robust security tooling, manage incidents, and set up scalable defenses while growing with

Qualifications

• 5+ years in security engineering with hands-on ownership of cloud and infrastructure security.
• Strong software engineering skills and experience building security tooling.
• Experience running incident response and vulnerability management.
• Strong grasp of AI security, including how AI agents change threat models.
• Willingness to own anything security-related yourself, big or small.

Responsibilities

• Incident and vulnerability response: track exploits, supply chain risks, and third-party breaches; assess exposure and fix quickly.
• Access and credentials: limit reach with short-lived credentials and tightly managed API keys.
• Monitoring and detection: logging and alerting across cloud, clusters, network, and SaaS tools.
• Product security: keep our product secure as we build and ship new features.
• Infrastructure security: secure cloud, GPU clusters, and agent sandboxes.
• Security operations: SSO, MFA, and endpoint security.

Skills

Security engineering

Cloud security

Software engineering

Incident response

Threat modeling

Job description

Goodfire is an AI interpretability research lab. We build interpretability agents and infrastructure to understand, monitor, and align AI models.

We believe that AI is the most consequential technology of our time. Yet AI models are trained by trial and error today, with limited understanding of what drives their behavior. Our goal is to advance the research and technology needed to fully understand and align AI so humanity can trust superintelligence.

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation founded by researchers who helped pioneer the field of interpretability at OpenAI and Google DeepMind. We are headquartered in San Francisco and have raised over $200M from leading investors including Lightspeed, Menlo, and B Capital.

About the role

We’re looking for our first security hire to own security across our infrastructure, product, and company. The security landscape is changing daily as AI gets more capable, and we need to protect ourselves against sophisticated, fast-evolving threats.

This is a foundational, hands‑on role. We need a strong engineer who stays on top of new vulnerabilities and attacks, responds quickly when one could affect us, and understands how the threat model is evolving. You’ll help define what security looks like for an AI research lab, working closely with our research, engineering, and operations teams.

Key responsibilities

• Incident and vulnerability response: track new exploits, supply chain risks, and third‑party breaches as they go public, then assess our exposure and fix it fast.
• Access and credentials: limit what people, services, and AI agents can reach, with short‑lived credentials and tightly managed API keys.
• Monitoring and detection: logging and alerting across our cloud, clusters, network, and SaaS tools.
• Product security: keep our product secure as we build and ship new features.
• Infrastructure security: secure our cloud, GPU clusters, and agent sandboxes.
• Security operations: SSO, MFA, and endpoint security.

What you’ll bring

Required experience

• 5+ years in security engineering, with hands‑on ownership of cloud and infrastructure security.
• Strong software engineering skills and experience building security tooling.
• Experience running incident response and vulnerability management.
• Strong grasp of AI security, including how AI agents change the threat model and how to use them in security work.
• Willingness and humility to own anything security‑related yourself, big or small.

Preferred qualifications

• Startup experience or building a security program from scratch.
• Experience securing ML research infrastructure or sandboxes for AI agents.
• Experience with application and product security.
• Corporate security experience: SSO, MFA, and endpoint management.

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.

What we offer

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.

The expected salary range for this position is $250,000 to $500,000 USD.

This role reports to our CTO.

Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to join a vital mission at an important point in its trajectory. We are developing groundbreaking technology with a world‑class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity. If you want to do your life's work with us, even if you believe you do not meet every single requirement.