Member of Technical Staff, Biosecurity

Member of Technical Staff, Biosecurity

Location: SF Bay Area or Tokyo, Japan
Type: Full-time

About Radical Numerics

Radical Numerics is an AI lab bringing the rigor of distributed systems, model architecture, and numerics research to the challenges of biology. We are building the infrastructure needed to unlock scaling on vast biological sequence, structure, and image datasets so that biological world models become a reality. Our team introduced hybrid architectures that unlocked million-token context windows, enabling work toward AI-designed whole genomes and real gene-editing tools.

We believe biology will be the most impactful and consequential application of AI—and that advancing capabilities must go hand-in-hand with advancing safety and biosecurity. The same systems that design biology must also help defend against it. This role is focused on building and deploying the technical systems that make biosecurity real.

About the Role

As a Member of Technical Staff, Biosecurity at Radical Numerics, you will lead the design, evaluation, and deployment of biosecurity systems for biological foundation models. You will build evaluation frameworks, define safety architecture, and work with government and external partners to translate technical capabilities into real-world biosecurity infrastructure.

This role blends research and engineering. You should be excited to move fluidly between technical depth and external engagement: understanding model behavior, building red-teaming and evaluation pipelines, designing system-level safeguards, and working with stakeholders to deploy biosecurity systems at scale.

What You'll Do

• Design and run biosecurity evaluations. Develop evaluation frameworks for biological foundation models covering sequence generation risk, synthesis screening evasion, and capability assessment across genomics, proteins, and multimodal systems. Build red-teaming pipelines and define benchmarks that measure real-world risk and misuse potential.
• Work directly with models and data. Prototype pipelines for pathogen detection, sequence classification, anomaly detection, and risk scoring of biological sequences or designs. Collaborate with research teams to understand model behavior, identify dangerous capabilities early, and inform model design with safety constraints.
• Define safety architecture. Help design system-level safeguards including access controls, gating, monitoring, human-in-the-loop review, and deployment constraints for sensitive capabilities. Contribute to internal safety standards and release policies.
• Bridge to real-world biosecurity systems. Translate technical capabilities into deployable systems such as biosurveillance platforms, sequence screening tools, and rapid detection and response pipelines. Work with government and partners to align systems with real-world workflows.
• Drive partnerships and external engagement. Engage with government agencies, help shape joint technical programs and pilots, and communicate model capabilities, risks, and mitigations clearly to stakeholders.
• Identify new opportunities. Discover product and platform opportunities in biosecurity, help define Radical Numerics' role in global biological risk infrastructure, and operate with high ownership in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment.

What We're Looking For

• Strong technical background in at least one of: machine learning and AI systems (especially large models), computational biology and bioinformatics, or biosecurity and biodefense with technical depth.
• Ability to reason concretely about what biological AI systems can and cannot do, how those capabilities translate into real-world risks, and how to measure and mitigate those risks.
• Experience building or working with ML systems, or strong computational biology experience.
• Ability to design evaluations, benchmarks, or experimental frameworks for biological data, including genomic sequences, pathogens, protein data, or multi-omics.
• Strong intuition for failure modes, adversarial behavior, and misuse risks, with the ability to translate ambiguous risks into concrete technical work.
• High agency: defines problems, runs with them, and ships.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially the ability to engage credibly with government, labs, and policy stakeholders and translate technical systems into clear narratives.

Nice to Have

• Experience with pathogen genomics, biosurveillance, or DNA synthesis screening.
• Background in AI safety, red-teaming, or model evaluations.
• Familiarity with hybrid systems such as BLAST + ML or retrieval + generation pipelines.
• Experience with models like Evo, ESM, AlphaFold, or genomic foundation models.
• Background in biodefense, intelligence, or global health security.
• Existing network across government, national labs, or global health organizations.

Why Radical Numerics

• Help build the multimodal biological world models needed for rapid detection, response, and countermeasures across global health.
• Work directly on frontier biological AI systems and define how they are evaluated, controlled, and deployed.
• Help shape global infrastructure for biological risk detection and response.