Job Description

Salary range: $500,000 - $600,000/year + benefits
Transluce is a fast-moving research lab building the public tech stack for understanding and debugging AI systems. We build world-class, AI-backed analysis tools and use these to set industry standards for evaluation. We are a non-profit with a mission to steer the development of AI toward the public good. Our engineering work spans product engineering, AI systems, and research infrastructure.
About the role: We are hiring a VP of Engineering to build the engineering function Transluce needs for its next stage of growth: from 20 FTEs (14 technical staff) to 40+.
You will help foster operational and technical excellence across our engineering team; create clarity around goals, ownership, milestones, and timelines; help define and execute our hiring roadmap; develop engineers and managers; and drive complex cross-team projects from ambiguous goals to reliable execution.
Core responsibilities:

Drive technical and operational excellence across the engineering function and broader org through culture, process, and systems
Hire and retain the best people in the world for Transluce’s mission
Build engineers’ and managers’ careers across the org
Work with technical staff and leadership across Transluce to create strong clarity and alignment around goals, priorities, and roadmaps, at both the org-level and team-level
Manage competing priorities and identify and explain trade-offs, advocating for what’s best for the organization
Clearly communicate Transluce’s mission, strategy, and technical direction internally and externally; know how each new hire would come to the team and contribute to that vision
Facilitate effective collaboration within and across teams
Set vision and prioritization for core infrastructure; work with senior engineers to design the overall platform/technical stack

Qualities of a strong candidate:

Able to operate on a 12+ month time horizon for organizational design, technical strategy, and overall org theory of change
Can hire and inspire senior engineers, researchers and managers by being someone they can learn and grow from
Articulates and argues for a clear perspective, but is prepared to disagree and commit
Past experience in a similar role: taking a small, fast-growing company from 20 to 40+ as a senior leader working with one or more layers of management below them
Strong management skills with an ability to both directly line manage teams and mentor and lead managers
Not afraid to get into the technical details where relevant, but also able to make good decisions without knowing every detail

We are located in San Francisco and enthusiastic to work together in-person. We are open to sponsoring international visas.

About Transluce

Transluce is an independent research lab that builds open, scalable technology for understanding AI systems and steering them in the public interest. Transluce means to shine light through something to reveal its structure. Today’s complex AI systems are difficult to understand—not even experts can reliably predict their behavior once deployed. Given AI's extraordinary consequences on society, we need scalable and open analyses of the capabilities and risks of AI systems.

We are building open source, AI-driven tools to understand and analyze AI systems. We will apply these tools to open-weight models, so the world can vet our analyses and improve their reliability. Once our technology has been vetted, we will work with frontier AI labs and governments to ensure that internal assessments reach the same standards as our publicly vetted procedures.

Email: info@transluce.org

Industry

Biotech & Life Sciences

Company Size

11-50 employees

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Year Founded

2024

Website

transluce.org

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