Head of Engineering, Platform

About Goodfire

Behind our name: Like fire, AI holds the potential for both immense benefit and significant risk. Just as mastering fire transformed human history, we believe the safe and intentional development of AI will shape the future of our species. Our goal is to tame this new fire.

Goodfire is an AI interpretability research company focused on understanding and designing AI systems that people can trust. Our mission is to advance humanity's understanding of AI to build safe and powerful AI systems. We believe that deep research breakthroughs are necessary to make this possible.

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco with a team of the world’s top interpretability researchers and engineers from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind. We’ve raised $59M from investors like Menlo, Lightspeed and Anthropic and work with customers including Arc Institute, Mayo Clinic, and Rakuten.

About the Role

We're looking for a highly technical Head of Engineering to grow our core platform. At Goodfire, we believe that leaders need to be in the trenches with their team and that engineering leaders also need to be exceptional engineers. We're looking for someone who can do everything it takes to ensure our core platform’s success from developing clean software interfaces for public consumption, making large training runs go smoothly, and ensuring success with our customers and design partners. You’ll have extremely high ownership over a critical core of the business.

You'll also be responsible for recruiting outstanding machine learning engineers from top AI labs to work on our mission. The right candidate is someone with existing networks in the frontier AI community and a proven track record of attracting and retaining top technical talent in a competitive market.

Key Responsibilities

Be a Key Technical Contributor

• Direct technical execution at the highest level is expected for all leaders.
• Convert state-of-the-art research into scalable, product-grade tools with urgency.
• Oversee infrastructure for model interpretability, training, and inference at frontier scale.

Build an Exemplary Engineering Team

• Recruit, hire, and retain top machine learning engineers from leading AI research labs.
• Develop and execute a hiring strategy that positions Goodfire as a destination for the best engineers in the field.
• Foster a high-performance culture equipped to tackle some of the hardest problems in AI.

Own Outcomes End-to-End

• Drive adoption of Goodfire's core platform.
• Collaborate directly with customers and go-to-market teams.
• Shape and reinforce Goodfire's culture and values as the company scales.

What You'll Bring

Required Experience

• 10+ years of engineering experience, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling engineering teams at high-growth startups or frontier AI labs.
• Exceptional track record recruiting machine learning engineers from top AI organizations.
• Deep technical expertise in ML infrastructure, distributed systems, and large-scale model training.
• Hands-on proficiency with PyTorch or JAX, modern ML tooling and inference engines.
• Strong network within the AI/ML research and engineering community.
• Genuine passion for AI safety, interpretability, and building systems that earn human trust.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience at a frontier AI lab or leading AI research organization.
• Experience shipping ML products to enterprise or research customers.
• Background in or familiarity with interpretability, alignment, or AI safety research.
• Public presence in the AI community (publications, open-source contributions, speaking engagements).

Our values

Goodfire is looking for individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We are building a team first and foremost.

Put mission and team first

All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.

Improve constantly

We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.

Take ownership and initiative

There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we’re building.

Action today

We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.

What We Offer

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.

Expected salary range: $300,000 - $450,000 USD (commensurate with experience)

Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to join a vital mission at an important point in its trajectory—we are developing groundbreaking technology with a world-class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity. If you want to do your life's work with us, apply now.