Founder inResidence

Advancements in AI bring both opportunities and serious risks. Atlas Ignota takes on society-scale AI risks that no existing institution is built to address — we design the intervention, validate it with domain experts and funders, then recruit and empower the career professional who will own it.

You can think of us as:

• A tiger team that identifies, scopes, and launches interventions that aren’t a good fit for existing organizations.
• A design studio developing and staffing product requirements docs for coordination and market failures.
• A think tank combined with whatever their analog of “tech transfer” would be.

Atlas is looking to incubate a cohort of Founders to each scope a different potential intervention and exit Atlas, with support, to lead it.

That’s why Atlas is launching a selective incubator for career professionals who have spent the last decade or more executing on relevant security topics, and now want to direct their skills to the most important risks facing society from growing AI capabilities. Our job is to lower the barriers to entry — both the cost of leaving your current career path and the risk that a good idea never gets off the ground — and to meaningfully raise the odds that the effort you launch succeeds. As an Incubated Founder, we’ll work with you to take one risk from a rough problem statement to a fundable plan: sharpening a concrete intervention, pressure-testing it against the field, and building the relationships and founding team to execute on it.

Founders will have between six months and two years to research a problem and develop a pitch, but we hold that timeline loosely — a founder is done when their effort is ready to stand on its own, not when a calendar says so. The goal is for founders to develop an ambitious plan as quickly as possible (early graduations welcome), complete with conditionally committed users and stakeholders, an excellent founding team, expert advisors, and organizational plans like milestones. Completion consists of pitching funders like Coefficient Giving on an ambitious grant, having assembled an excellent founding team, and launching with a clear path to scaling up your project substantially, such as $10 million or more.

While Atlas is interested in many aspects of AI Resilience, our first cohort of founders will focus on securing AI infrastructure.

We expect transformative AI will need to be secured against threat actors like nation-states, terrorists, insider threats, and even misaligned AIs themselves — actors who may have enormous resources, intentions to harm large numbers of people, or significant legitimate access. These may soon be the highest-stakes security problems in the world, and you’ll be one of a very small pool of people qualified to work on them.

Examples of problems we’re looking for owners on include:

By the end of the program, a successful founder has:

• Sharpened a rough direction into a concrete intervention, with attestations from domain experts that it’s plausible and from decision-makers that it would change their behavior.
• Built the relationships and founding team needed to execute it.
• Produced a grant proposal in partnership with an interested donor we’ll introduce. Joining the incubator does not guarantee follow-on funding for your project, but the goal of the program is to develop plans in contact with funders that they’re excited to scale. If there’s not a mutually satisfactory project to scale up, we’ll support you in finding your next role.

Outcomes we’d be excited about:

• You become the founder and/or directly responsible individual (DRI) of an object-level intervention.
• You become a grantmaker, or “general manager” of grantmakers, directing serious capital across this field.
• You become the advisor, mentor, and recruiter for the next wave of GCR founders in this field.

We’re not looking to maximize follow-on funding — we’re looking for people the field builds around.

Atlas is also hiring Field Strategists, and we’re running both searches at once, with separate applications. The two roles are complementary.

• Field Strategists map a field’s incentives and bottlenecks, identify points of leverage, and de-risk high-impact interventions across an ecosystem. Their goal is to scope promising solutions clearly enough to pitch them, identify and recruit the right founders to own them, and support the handoff from strategy to execution. The Field Strategist holds an ongoing position at Atlas, building the skills and praxis for this approach for multiple efforts simultaneously and in series.
• Incubated Founders take a single object-level project and iterate a rough idea into a fundable, executable plan. Founders will learn and practice field strategy for one specific problem, which will become a project they will remain responsible for and transition out of Atlas.

Upon joining Atlas, you’re not locked in: a founder who realizes their strength is ecosystem strategy can switch tracks, and vice versa.

• One of the following backgrounds, or similar:
  • Experience working on cybersecurity in a national security context, especially building SL5 facilities, intelligence, or offensive security.
  • Experience in ML security research: tamper resistance, backdoors, password locking.
  • Experience in a relevant industry context — e.g. at a frontier AI lab, or in security at a hyperscaler, hardware company, or government contractor.
  • Exceptional capability in a relevant area — e.g. academic security research, security entrepreneurship, developing security standards, or AI hardware or firmware.
• The practice of breaking down ambiguous problems into clear next steps, and you don’t get overwhelmed when you lack guidance.
• The ability to clearly articulate your plans, verbally and in writing, to coordinate and motivate others.
• A practice of reviewing the state-of-the-art after having an idea, coupled with an urge to prototype, test, and iterate.
• Experience coordinating and aligning external stakeholders to work toward a common goal.
• A strong compulsion to do something about AI risk — you understand what it would mean to be responsible for mitigating a particular risk from AI, and you want it anyway, because no one else is.
• The ability and inclination to do this work, to some extent, without Atlas — but you believe the program’s network, expertise, and institutional support would substantially decrease the difficulty, increase your odds of success, and/or scale your enjoyment while doing it.

We expect most hires will have most, but perhaps not all, of these.

• A habit of doing non-technical coordination work despite a technical background.
• Led or started an organization, or managed people.
• Already worked on related AI security problems, and have ideas you’re ready to pursue.
• Deep networks in cybersecurity or the AI safety community.
• An uncanny ability to get people to tell you things they wouldn’t write down, get conversations with incredibly busy people, or come up with creative ideas to align incentives.
• The ability to hold a US security clearance.

We expect most hires will have 1–3 of these.

• Already have the answer to the problem you want to solve, and want funding more than a thought partner.
• Want a stable, well-scoped role with a clear roadmap handed to you.
• Are drawn to AI risk in the abstract but don’t want to own a single specific, concrete problem.
  • If you’d be happy owning multiple problems, or multiple dimensions of the same problem, until you’re ready to hand them off, Field Strategist might be right for you.

• $150,000 – $300,000 a year. More senior candidates may be eligible for higher than this maximum salary.
• Location: remote, with plans for local hubs in SF, DC, London, and Tel Aviv. Ask us about relocation support if you’re interested in moving to a hub.
• Travel: likely 5–20%, largely team offsites meeting in the hubs, and conferences.

We also offer:

• Up to a 6% 401k match, equitably benchmarked based on experience and adjusted for location.
• Excellent medical insurance options: 10–20 plans to choose from across major national and local carriers. Employee and family premiums for most plans are fully covered by the company contribution.
• Excellent dental and vision insurance. Employee and family premiums for most plans are fully covered by the company contribution.
• Company-paid life insurance, AD&D, long- and short-term disability insurance, as well as voluntary supplemental insurance options.
• 19 holidays, including the week off between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day.