Frontier AI capabilities are advancing rapidly. Over 300 prominent figures, including 15 Nobel Prize and Turing Award recipients and 11 former heads of state and ministers, have publicly warned that this progress poses unprecedented risks.

Lyptus Research is a not-for-profit AI safety research group based in Australia. Our remit is to evaluate and forecast the dangerous AI capabilities that may lead to these risks.

We’re spinning up a team to better measure the biosecurity risks of rising AI capability.

The Role

We’re looking for a senior scientific leader to build, steer, and grow our new biosecurity team. The question we exist to answer is a sharp one: can emerging AI meaningfully help someone build a biological weapon, and how would we know? Existing evaluations and studies lean heavily on bioinformatics or automation. This team’s mission is to bring that same clarity to the wet lab.

Your remit will be broad: setting the scientific direction for our wet-lab research, steering research strategy across organisations, and helping grow and govern our charitable mission as part of the executive team. You’ll lead a small, senior team driving that research, starting with our founding scientist.

The field is moving at an unprecedented pace, and there is no established playbook. You will need to operate under the tension of urgency and ambiguity, while holding a high bar on detail, rigour, and scientific quality.

This role is available immediately in a fractional capacity, at one or two days a week, with the aim of transitioning to full-time as the engagement proves out. It is remote-friendly.

What you’ll do

In your first three months

• Getting deep on the science and our current research, alongside our founding scientist
• Shaping the early research direction and setting the strategy
• Steering our first wet-lab uplift experiments
• Forging relationships with leading biosecurity research groups and AI labs

Thereafter

• Building, managing, and developing the science team
• Owning our research strategy, and collaborating with global efforts to help direct multi-organisation research strategy
• Acting as an executive partner to our founder, Sean, to help mature and steer Lyptus Research against its charitable mission

What you’ll bring

We care less about your title than whether you’ve led scientific work and the people doing it. That might look like an R&D or science lead in a startup or industry, a founder or founding scientist, a principal or senior scientist who has run their own programme, or a group leader with real management experience.

• Comfort operating somewhere high-agency and high-ambiguity, where there was no established playbook
• Strong wet-lab grounding, with the depth to shape and direct experimental work and judge its rigour
• A history of doing rigorous, high-quality science while moving quickly
• No background in AI needed. That’s something we can teach you.

A plus if you’ve carried real accountability for your work, to a board, funder, or regulator, not just delivered the science.

A PhD is welcome but not required. We care about what you have led and built, not your credentials.

Why join

This is a rare chance to shape a young organisation from the inside, on a problem that genuinely matters, in a field that barely yet exists. We hold a strong conviction in building an exceptional team, and we back our people accordingly.

If that sounds like you, we would love to talk.