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 scientist to lead, scale, and grow our new biosecurity team. As AI systems get more capable, can they uplift a malicious actor trying to do real harm with biology? 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 in this role will be very broad, running from hands-on work at the wet-lab bench, through steering research strategy across organisations, to helping grow and govern our charitable mission as part of the executive team.

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. Upon a successful early engagement, we would hope to transition it into a full-time position.

What you’ll do

In your first three months

• Working at the bench alongside our founding scientist
• Running our first wet-lab uplift experiments
• Shaping the early research direction
• 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

• A track record of leading science teams, people, and research strategy, ideally somewhere high-agency and high-ambiguity, such as an R&D lead at a biotech startup
• Strong wet-lab grounding, with the ability to shape and run experimental work yourself
• A history of doing rigorous, high-quality science while moving quickly
• No background in AI needed. That’s something we can teach you.

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.