Threat Intel Manager, Influence Operations & Surveillance

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 375,000 - 455,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a Threat Intel Manager to lead the Influence Operations & Surveillance team. You will set strategy, build a small investigative group, and drive investigations into state-linked surveillance misuse and commercial spyware threats.

You’ll deploy automated detection and coordinate cross-platform analyses while engaging with government and researchers. This ground-floor leadership role requires building capabilities, presenting findings to diverse

Qualifications

• Have deep subject matter expertise in influence operations, coordinated inauthentic behavior, or state surveillance / commercial spyware ecosystems.
• Have led investigative teams or threat intel teams.
• Have demonstrated proficiency in SQL and Python for data analysis and threat detection.
• Have experience attributing campaigns to specific threat actors, including state-sponsored operations.
• Have strong OSINT tradecraft for investigating online information ecosystems.
• Have hands-on experience with large language models and how they can be weaponized for IO and surveillance.
• Can present analytical work to technical and non-technical audiences, including government stakeholders and senior leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own strategy, priorities, and outcomes for the Influence Operations & Surveillance threat intel mission area.
• Hire, manage, and develop a small team of technical threat investigators with IO and surveillance expertise.
• Lead investigations into state-linked surveillance misuse including commercial spyware vendors and surveillance products whose end customers are authoritarian governments and AI-enabled influence campaigns.
• Stand up the mission area's first automated detection: abuse signals, behavioral clustering, and coordinated-network detection tailored to information manipulation and surveillance tooling.
• Conduct cross-platform analysis linking on-platform activity to broader campaigns across social media, messaging platforms, and the spyware supply chain.
• Attribute campaigns to specific actors, with particular focus on state-sponsored operations from geopolitically significant regions.
• Own external engagement: government partners, platform integrity teams, academic and civil-society researchers, and threat intelligence sharing communities.
• Drive public and partner-facing reporting on AI-enabled IO and surveillance, and inform safety-by-design strategies as multimodal and agentic capabilities reshape the landscape.

Skills

SQL

Python

Threat intelligence

Team leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

About the company

the company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

We are looking for a threat intel manager to build and run our Influence Operations & Surveillance team within Threat Intelligence. This team detects, investigates, and disrupts the misuse of the company's AI systems for influence operations, coordinated inauthentic behavior, and surveillance operations by authoritarian states and the commercial spyware ecosystem.

This is a ground-floor leadership role. The mission area today produces some of our most consequential casework and external reporting almost entirely through manual investigation; you will stand up its purpose-built detection capabilities, set the strategy for how a frontier AI company finds and counters state-linked information manipulation and surveillance misuse, and you'll personally be involved with the most complex investigations.

*Important context: In this position you may be exposed to explicit content spanning a range of topics, including those of a sexual, violent, or psychologically disturbing nature. This role may require responding to escalations during weekends and holidays.*

Key responsibilities

• Own strategy, priorities, and outcomes for the Influence Operations & Surveillance threat intel mission area
• Hire, manage, and develop a small team of technical threat investigators with IO and surveillance expertise
• Personally lead investigations into state-linked surveillance misuse including commercial spyware vendors and surveillance products whose end customers are authoritarian governments and AI-enabled influence campaigns
• Stand up the mission area's first automated detection: abuse signals, behavioral clustering, and coordinated-network detection tailored to information manipulation and surveillance tooling
• Conduct cross-platform analysis linking on-platform activity to broader campaigns across social media, messaging platforms, and the spyware supply chain
• Attribute campaigns to specific actors, with particular focus on state-sponsored operations from geopolitically significant regions
• Own external engagement: government partners, platform integrity teams, academic and civil-society researchers, and threat intelligence sharing communities
• Drive public and partner-facing reporting on AI-enabled IO and surveillance, and inform safety-by-design strategies as multimodal and agentic capabilities reshape the landscape

Minimum qualifications

• Have deep subject matter expertise in influence operations, coordinated inauthentic behavior, or state surveillance / commercial spyware ecosystems
• Have led investigative teams or threat intel teams.
• Have demonstrated proficiency in SQL and Python for data analysis and threat detection
• Have experience attributing campaigns to specific threat actors, including state-sponsored operations
• Have strong OSINT tradecraft for investigating online information ecosystems
• Have hands-on experience with large language models and how they can be weaponized for IO and surveillance
• Can present analytical work to technical and non-technical audiences, including government stakeholders and senior leadership

Preferred qualifications

• Experience at a major technology platform on influence operations, platform integrity, or content authenticity
• Background in intelligence analysis, information operations, or counter-disinformation in government or military contexts
• Experience investigating commercial spyware or surveillance-as-a-service vendors (e.g., civil-society or vendor-research backgrounds)
• Experience investigating operations linked to Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or other state-sponsored campaigns
• Fluency in Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Farsi, and/or Arabic with nuanced regional and geopolitical context
• Familiarity with social network analysis for mapping coordinated behavior
• Active Top Secret security clearance

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$375,000-$455,000 USD

Logistics

• LogisticsMinimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
• Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At the company we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact - advancing our long-term goals of steerable, t