Chief Information Security Officer
Summary
METR, a nonprofit AI-safety research organization, is hiring a CISO to be its founding security lead: owning the security roadmap, advising leadership on partnerships and model access, and managing a team of security engineers and contractors. The role is hands-on across incident response, infrastructure hardening, and red-teaming, with tooling including Okta, Tailscale, Kubernetes, CrowdStrike Fa
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.
About the role
Security at METR is becoming its own dedicated team, and you will lead it. 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 from external actors and internal agents.
We now need someone thinking about organizational security posture full time and proactively planning against future threats. You will own security at METR, ensuring our security strategy grows as the organization does.
What this role looks like
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Advising METR leadership: You will advise on the security implications of new partnerships, evaluation programs, and model access arrangements before commitments are made.
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Setting organizational strategy: You will set our security roadmap and build up our security culture, consolidating ownership of security areas that today are spread across teams and filling gaps that currently have no owner.
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Managing the security team: You will manage a team of security engineers and contractors across incident response, infrastructure hardening, red-teaming, and meeting the security requirements of our external partnerships.
Required Skills
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Deep security and management background. You’ve been accountable for an org’s security posture or led high-stakes security engagements in the past, including being part of or leading an IR team.
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Hands-on mentality. You’re still interested in the lower-level security details, and can personally investigate an incident, read a cloud IAM policy, review a sandboxing design, or configure identity and endpoint tooling.
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Threat modeling and red teaming experience. You can reason about defending against both insiders and sophisticated, well-resourced adversaries.
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Mission-aligned. You care deeply about METR’s mission of investigating catastrophic risks for AI.
Nice-to-haves
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Built a security team from scratch (first security hire or founding CISO).
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Led incident response end to end, including decision-making and communication to stakeholders.
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Experience securing AI/ML systems or agent infrastructure.
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Familiarity with the tooling in our environment: DataDog, Kubernetes, CrowdStrike Falcon, Okta, Tailscale, Pulumi, PostgreSQL.
Skills
As published by lever · 9 questions · 4 written answers
Basics
Resume/CV, Full name, Email, Phone, Current location, Current company, Linkedin URL, GitHub URL, Personal website URL
Short answers (1)
- When is the earliest you would want to start working with us? optional
Pick from a list (4)
- Are you currently authorized to work in the United States? (We are a cap-exempt nonprofit and can sponsor visas.)
- Are you happy to relocate to, or already in, the Bay Area and excited to work in-person at our office in Berkeley?
- How did you hear about this role? optional
- What information about your application would you like us to share with similar organizations? optional
Written answers (4)
- Where are you currently based?
- Do you have an accelerated timeline by which you need a decision (e.g., because of a competing offer)? If so, describe your preferred timeline here. If not, leave this blank. optional
- What's the best evidence that you'd potentially be great in this position?
- Why METR?