Vertical Lead

About Goodfire

Goodfire is a research company using interpretability to understand, learn from, and design AI systems. Our mission is to build the next generation of safe and powerful AI—not by scaling alone, but by understanding the intelligence we're building.

Scaling has proven powerful, but today's approach is fundamentally limited: we can't meaningfully understand, debug, or shape what models learn. Every engineering discipline has been gated by fundamental science and AI is at that inflection point now.

We're advancing the science of how AI systems actually work. Treating models as black boxes is an unnecessary handicap—we have access to the structures inside them, and understanding those structures lets us steer what models learn, make them safer and more useful, and extract the vast knowledge they contain. Our goal is to make AI that can be understood, debugged, and shaped like software.

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're backed by over $200M from B Capital, Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed, Eric Schmidt, and others.

About the role

We’re looking for a Vertical Lead to own and scale a vertical. This role demands an unusual range: the technical depth to architect novel solutions, the leadership to direct a team of engineers and research scientists, the emotional intelligence to form successful partner relationships, and the vision to launch and scale a new market.

This is an incredibly challenging and exciting role where you will operate like a founder: translating our platform into solutions and products, defining the market, and proving product-market fit. That means owning what we build, sell, and deliver, leading a forward-deployed team to create solutions, and managing partner relationships end to end: from scoping and sale through delivery and expansion.

This role turns frontier research into real-world impact, allowing our advances in the science of interpretability to unlock the promise of safe and powerful AI. You will typically be working with frontier companies in one of Life Sciences, Robotics and Vision, general Language and Reasoning models, or new verticals that we may focus on.

Your official title would be the specific vertical e.g. Robotics Lead.

Key responsibilities

• Build and scale a vertical or domain: prove product-market fit, define solutions, win new prospects, and drive sustained growth
• Own technical delivery: direct what we build and ensure it solves real problems for partners
• Manage partnerships end-to-end: from initial scoping and sale, to delivering value and demonstrating impact, to securing renewals and expanding accounts
• Lead a forward-deployed Field Team of engineers and research scientists to deliver technical solutions
• Shape the platform into solutions: translate frontier interpretability research into repeatable products, platforms, or services that our deeply technical partners (Heads of AI, Heads of Research, CTOs) will want to buy

What you’ll bring

Required experience

• Strong ability to combine technical fluency, product intuition, and customer understanding into high value, repeatable solutions.
• Strong technical fluency and experience leading cross-functional, technical teams.
• Strong understanding of modern AI technology.
• Scrappiness, willingness to persist in ambiguity, ability to learn quickly, and a generalist “can-do” mindset.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience as a founder, general manager or highly field facing product manager or engineering manager.
• Deep domain experience in a vertical where companies are training models (or attempting to). Come with a perspective - we want to hear it!
• Technical degree or equivalent professional experience within AI or Research
• Track record of excellence in a high growth startup.
• Experience working with frontier or open source models and understanding of model training.

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.

Where we work

We are hiring for this position in our San Francisco HQ. We are in person 5 days a week, with one company-wide remote week per month.

What we offer

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

The expected salary range for this position is $250,000 - $375,000 USD.

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, even if you believe you do not meet every single requirement, apply now.