National Security Lead, APAC

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 an experienced National Security practitioner to guide our strategic engagements with Asia-Pacific national security and intelligence communities. Working closely with the national security team based in the US and the APAC policy team, this senior role will help to shape the company's approach to national security policy and partnerships in APAC during a critical period in AI development and governance. You will be the day to day point of contact with national security partners in the Asia-Pacific, translating technological developments for national security audiences and building mutually beneficial collaborations.. You will also work closely with our APAC public sector sales team to support public sector deployment of Claude in high-leverage use cases that strengthen national security, enhance government efficiency, and accelerate allied competitiveness to promote regional peace and security.

This role is based in Australia. This job will also require travel across the Asia-Pacific region and to the United States.

In this role you will

• Lead policy engagement with APAC national security partners on issues related to government use and national security implications of frontier models

• Engage key NatSec policy stakeholders (e.g., via briefings, consultations, demos, roundtables), in coordination with the wider national security and APAC policy teams.

• Partner with the APAC public sector sales team to support commercial efforts involving government agency deployments

• Support and promote public-private research collaborations

• Build a coalition of government agencies, nonprofits, safety institutes, think tanks and academics to in APAC to share knowledge around national security issues and ensure the safe and responsible adoption of frontier AI

• Collaborate with technical teams to translate the company threat model research into concrete policy proposals, stakeholder education, and thought leadership opportunities

You may be a good fit if you

• Have 10+ years of experience working in national security agencies, or a combination of government and related private sector experience

• Are high-agency, able to develop and execute strategy independently, taking account of dependencies with other cross-functional teams within the company (including but not limited to policy, go-to-market, trust and safety, legal, product, research, comms, and marketing)

• Possess strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly when briefing policymakers and government officials

• Have demonstrated interest and experience in a complicated technical subject (ideally, AI, but other examples could be quantum computing, cryptography, fusion power, etc.)

• Have had some legal training in or exposure to contract negotiation

• Are willing/able to participate in a process to obtain/retain a security clearance in Australia

Logistics

Minimum 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.

For roles performing work in California: We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records or criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. 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.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that the company recruiters only contact you from @the company.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of the company. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate the company recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links—visit  the company.com/careers  directly for confirmed position openings.

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, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to the company, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

The company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:  Learn about  our policy for using AI in our application process.