Field Strategist

Scope many interventions at once, and hand every one of them off.

Advancements in AI bring both opportunities and serious risks. Atlas Ignota takes on society-scale AI risks that no existing institution is built to address - we design the intervention, validate it with domain experts and funders, then recruit and empower the specialist who will own it.

You can think of us as:

• A tiger team that identifies, scopes, and launches interventions that aren't a good fit for existing organizations.
• A design studio developing and staffing product requirements docs for coordination and market failures.
• A think tank combined with whatever their analog of "tech transfer" would be.

We start from the opportunity or risk, map the context in which the need for interventions arise. Then we sketch possible interventions, iteratively working with experts to ensure feasibility and potential stakeholders to establish sufficiency to have the desired impact. Finally, we will make it as easy as possible for a career professional to take ownership over each intervention (we believe most of these efforts don't require risk-seeking young generalists courted by traditional VCs, but rather are best addressed by career professionals who have spent the last decade or more executing on very similar work).

Atlas is looking to hire a cohort of Field Strategists, each of whom will scope multiple potential interventions simultaneously and hand them all off.

While this is a separate role from our Founders (who will scope a single intervention they would then lead themselves), we expect the Field Strategists will work closely in collaboration with our cohort of Founders.

While Atlas is interested in many aspects of AI Resilience, we expect this first cohort will likely focus on some combination of AI infrastructure security (especially these 6 problems) and epistemic security; we will prioritize candidates with relevant experience.

• The hire has created two or more clear write-ups, each describing:
  • Why advances in AI capabilities pose a specific risk to society.
  • What a proposed intervention would look like.
  • Who are the best people in the world to advise and steer the intervention (and their attestation that this solution is plausible).
  • What decision-makers would change their behavior because of this intervention (and their attestation that this intervention plan is sufficient).
  • Who would likely fund it (and what their decision criteria would be).
  • What skills and experience the founder needs, and where we are likely to find that person.
• The hire has worked with a recruiter to pitch potential founders for that organization and has introduced one to potential funders.
• A more junior hire would:
  • Focus on 1-2 interventions at a time.
  • Benefit from checking in with Atlas leadership multiple times per week.
• A more senior hire would:
  • Develop 3-5 organizations simultaneously and on ~3-5 month timescales.
  • Benefit from the freedom of little oversight.
  • Be "fire and forget", sharing weekly updates as needed to highlight potential opportunities.
  • (Perhaps) provide mentorship to junior hires.

Note that we expect this first cohort to focus primarily on starting new efforts in the United States that could scale globally, rather than creating efforts starting outside the US, but this is not a hard constraint.

• Expertise in navigating and/or modifying complex systems, natural or human-made.
  • This could look like complex systems research in academia, policy research at a think tank, market research in a product role, or analyst research in the intelligence community.
• A generalist streak: able to quickly understand nuances in a variety of topics, including ML architecture, export control laws, and ideological differences within the AI community.
• A strong ability to interview experts and synthesize across domains.
  
  Comfort forming and revising hypotheses quickly.
• Strong creative problem-solving skills - you love finding pareto improvements to the obvious options.
• A capability to reason about AI trajectory, safety, and future-state technologies.

Plus meaningful experience in at least one of these areas:

• Software security, vulnerability analysis (or related).
• Hardware security or hardware supply chain security (or related).
• Identity and authentication systems (or related).
• Privacy engineering or privacy threat modeling (or related).

• Cybersecurity strategy, Red Team, or threat intelligence (or related).
• Cyber-defense coordination or policy (e.g. IC, CISA).
• Risk analysis in…