Member of Technical Staff - Engineering Lead

AIUC builds standards and insurance for frontier AI. Our mission is to Underwrite superintelligence. We exist because risk, not capability, is becoming the binding constraint on AI being useful. History offers lessons for how to build confidence in new technology; electricity burned down houses until insurers funded Underwriters Laboratories (UL) to certify products against their standards. Today, the UL mark is a trustmark on every light bulb in America. We’re building that for AI.

AIUC-1, our standard for agent security, serves frontier builders like Cursor, Lovable, ElevenLabs, and Harvey. We've raised $55m from Ribbit, First Harmonic and Nat Friedman to audit frontier AI. Our team comes from METR, Anthropic, McKinsey, and OpenAI. Come join us.

The Role

We’re building a universal autonomous red-teamer: we stress-test any agent (Cursor, Harvey, ElevenLabs, etc) for any risk (e.g. financial losses) and any attacks (e.g. novel jailbreaks). We are now sprinting towards general availability of this product.

Our engineering team has one lead today, and it's growing faster than one person can manage. We're hiring a second. You'll run half the team alongside Riley, our current lead, each of you with your own reports. Your time splits about evenly across building, managing, and hiring. We want managers who still write code

The technical split is clean. Our current lead owns infrastructure and security. You own product engineering.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the technical work that takes our certification platform to GA

• Find ways to certify more customers with less manual work, and bring more auditors onto the product

• Help decide where the product goes after GA: deeper tooling for auditors, a self-serve platform that onboards a thousand new customers, or some mix. You'll answer that with the founders, through product judgment and experiments

• Take over at least four engineers in your first few months, and build a team that's better than the sum of its parts

• Join our hiring loops in your first month or two. Within a year, you'll own hiring for your side of the team

This role is hard. Building, managing, and hiring all compete for the same week, and none of them can slide for long. You'll also share a team with another lead, which only works with a lot of trust and direct conversation.

What we're looking for

You've likely been an engineering manager or tech lead manager at a top-tier engineering company, and spent real time at a startup. Or you founded a company, then hired and managed the team.

• You've shipped customer-facing product end to end, and can defend the choices you made in detail

• You've managed engineers directly and helped them grow

• You want to keep building: about a third of your time goes to hands-on work in Node.js, TypeScript, Python, and AWS

• You've done excellent work inside a system someone else built, alongside startup or founder experience. 8+ years is typical; founders who've hired and managed may have fewer

• You can co-run a team: split reports, share decisions, and make hard calls together

This role doesn't need deep ML, PyTorch, or evals experience. That work sits with AIUC Labs.

Nice to haves:

• You've built security or compliance products. Not required; how fast you're growing counts for more

• You've been a hiring manager

• Infrastructure depth. Our current lead covers it, but it helps

We are in the business of building trust. We take our values seriously and treat them as commitments to each other, held to the same bar as the ones we make to customers.

• Strong back: high standards, keep our promises, work hard.

• Fast feet: experiment, cut scope, take delight in pace.

• Eyes up: wrestle with the mission, and let where AI is heading shape our strategy, our teams and our day-to-day work.

• Open heart: say the scary thing, create connection, make room for emotions.

Underwriting superintelligence is our life's work. If you want it to be yours, apply now.

• Competitive annual salary

• Equity (significant part of total compensation)

• Health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents

• Visa sponsorship and relocation stipend to bring you to SF, if needed

• Daily lunch, dinner & snacks