IT & Security Manager

About this role

ABOUT US

FAR.AI http://FAR.AI is a non-profit AI research institute working to ensure advanced AI is safe and beneficial for everyone. Our mission is to facilitate breakthrough AI safety research, advance global understanding of AI risks and solutions, and foster a coordinated global response.

We’re structured to support that work from early research through real-world adoption:

Independent by design. We can pursue what's most impactful based on our theory of change and share what we find publicly.

A portfolio approach. Rather than focus on one single direction, we run diverse bets across the safety stack. We take promising ideas from initial experiments to deployment, informed by red-team partnerships with frontier labs and governments.

Serious infrastructure for ambitious research. A dedicated engineering team runs our compute cluster and experiment-scaling stack, so researchers spend their time on research instead of on infra.

Setting the standard. Our events convene key decision makers; our red-team works with frontier developers and governments; and our communications inform the public. Together, this drives adoption and sets the new standard in safety.

Since our founding in July 2022, we've grown to 50+ staff https://www.far.ai/about/team, published 40+ academic papers https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=FVJ24k8AAAAJ, and convened leading AI safety events https://far.ai/events/. Our work is recognized globally, with publications at premier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML including a Best Paper Honorable Mention in 2026 https://icml.cc/virtual/2026/oral/71065, and ICLR, and features in the Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/175e5314-a7f7-4741-a786-273219f433a1, Nature News https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02218-7, Wired Magazine https://www.wired.com/story/jailbreaking-ai-models-google-anthropic-openai-spacexai/ and MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/28/905615/reinforcement-learning-adversarial-attack-gaming-ai-deepmind-alphazero-selfdriving-cars/. We conduct pre-deployment testing on behalf of frontier developers such as OpenAI and independent evaluations for governments including the EU AI Office https://www.far.ai/news/far-ai-selected-to-lead-eu-ai-act-cbrn-risk-consortium and publish the AI Security Leaderboard https://leaderboard.far.ai/ based on our red-teaming expertise. We help steer and grow the AI safety field through developing https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06624 research https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20702 roadmaps https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396910034_Open_Technical_Problems_in_Open-Weight_AI_Model_Risk_Management with renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio; running FAR.Labs https://www.far.ai/programs/far-labs, an AI safety-focused co-working space in Berkeley housing 40+ members; and supporting the community through targeted grants https://www.far.ai/programs/grantmaking to technical researchers.

THE ROLE

We are hiring an IT & Security Manager to keep FAR.AI http://FAR.AI running reliably and securely as we grow. This is a hands-on role for someone who thinks about internal systems the way a security-minded engineer does: curious about what an attacker would actually go after, and more interested in systems that hold up under pressure than in systems that pass an audit.

You will report to the COO and work closely with our Head of Research Acceleration, who owns research compute and cluster infrastructure. You own everything on the organizational side: accounts, devices, identity and access, the FAR.Labs’ office network and the security posture underneath it. In the short- to mid-term future, you will hire an in-person IT Coordinator to handle day-to-day support, and you will manage them. You are the first person on this team, and you will shape what it becomes.

WHY THIS ROLE / WHY NOW

IT at FAR.AI http://FAR.AI has been distributed across finance, business operations, research, and the executive team since our founding. That worked when we were 15 people, but has become a barrier at 50. We’re intentionally not looking for an MSP, and instead looking for someone we’re excited to build alongside.

Although our security posture is reasonably strong, we are looking to improve this to withstand targeted AI driven attacks as we increasingly work in security critical areas. We have a documented list of known improvements waiting for an owner, a risk surface that grows with every frontier lab partnership, and researchers who move fast and need to keep moving. You will be working on real problems in your first week, with a mandate to go after root causes.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

- IT operations: Own our core internal systems end-to-end: accounts, devices, identity and access management, onboarding and offboarding, the FAR.Labs office network, and the daily support that keeps a growing team working.

- Security remediation: Work through our known security gaps, prioritized by risk. Access controls, endpoint hardening, data protection, data governance, and vendor and application risk are the near-term substance.

- Self-serve infrastructure: Reduce the amount of work that has to route through you. Partner with Business Operations and other teams to design systems and processes that reduce manual work.

- Cross-functional partnership: Work with team leads across Research, Operations, Futures (events), and Communications to understand how they actually work and help them build securely inside their own domains. You work cross-functionally to drive AI adoption.

- Building the team: Hire the in-person IT Coordinator, then manage and develop them. You get to define the role in accordance with the organization’s needs. Over time, this team may grow.

- Internal communication and change management: Roll out changes in a way people can live with. You communicate clearly about what is changing and why, and establish feedback loops to continue iterating post-deployment.

MUST-HAVE…