Talent

Member of Technical Staff

Syntony · Remote · Durham, NC · Team growth planned across SF · DC · London · Brussels · Singapore

Build the infrastructure underneath our practice. Evaluation pipelines, agentic systems testing, risk data, GovTune AI, and causal modeling. Individual contributors who ship into real engagements.

About Syntony

Syntony is an AI risk firm. We conduct adversarial evaluations of frontier and production AI systems, build the governance architecture to act on findings, and ship software that makes both repeatable. We work with frontier labs, public sector clients, and enterprise deployments where the stakes are real.

About the role

Member of Technical Staff is an individual contributor role with real ownership. You will build evaluation infrastructure, ship features across our product suite, and work directly with red teamers, policy analysts, and forecasting specialists on real engagements.

We are hiring across several areas. You can apply to any of them, and we will find the best fit during the process.

Build, ship, evaluate

Code you write runs in real engagements. Findings from your tooling end up in board-facing reports.

Multi-disciplinary by design

Engineering decisions are pressure-tested by people who use the tools.

Real ownership

You own systems end-to-end. You talk to clients. You shape the roadmap.

Decision-relevant outputs

Nothing builds for the drawer. Work is scoped so the result lands with a reviewer, regulator, or operator.

Open areas

Areas we are hiring into

Evaluation Infrastructure

Pipelines, harnesses, and reproducibility tooling for adversarial testing. Logging, evidence capture, and structured outputs that reviewers can audit.

Agentic Systems and Tool Use

Sandboxing, autonomy testing, and delegation evaluation. Scaffolding for testing systems that act on their environment, including memory, planning, and multi-step tool use.

Risk Data and Index Engineering

Ingestion, scoring, and visualization for the Enterprise AI Risk Index. Data engineering, sector taxonomies, and modeling.

GovTune AI Engineering

Building the product that turns red-team traces into governance findings. Structured extraction, workflow design, NLP, and reviewer-facing tooling.

Causal Modeling and System Dynamics

Backend for CLD Suite. Causal loop diagrams that map AI risk across safety, operations, and compliance. Modeling, rendering, and interactive analysis.

Strong candidates will have

  • 3+ years of professional engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated work.
  • Strong software fundamentals in Python; comfort across the stack.
  • A track record of shipping: code we can look at, products that exist, contributions we can read.
  • Clear written communication and the ability to explain technical work to non-technical reviewers.
  • Genuine interest in AI safety, evaluation, governance, or strategic risk.

Bonus

  • Experience with LLM evaluation frameworks (Inspect, OpenAI Evals, lm-eval-harness).
  • Prior work on adversarial ML, red teaming, agentic systems, or AI safety research.
  • Background in policy, governance, or applied risk analysis that complements your engineering.
  • Open-source contributions, published research, or substantive technical communication.
  • Experience working with frontier labs or in regulated industries.

How we evaluate

We weight demonstrated work over credentials. Lead with your strongest work: code, papers, products, or public analysis.

  1. Application review and short async conversation.
  2. Paid work sample (3 to 4 hours) related to your area of focus.
  3. Two technical conversations.
  4. Reference conversations.
  5. Offer.
Compensation & benefits

The offer

Cash

We pay competitively for engineering at our stage. Numbers are a real conversation, not a posted band. We calibrate to scope, seniority, and what you need to make this work.

Equity

Founding-team equity. Real ownership, not symbolic. The grant reflects that you are joining before the round, not after it.

Benefits

Healthcare, retirement, generous time off, parental leave. We use the same infrastructure most serious early-stage companies use and we tailor the package to your situation at offer.

Equipment

Your choice of hardware. Whatever lets you do your best work, including coworking if you want it.

Research and publication

You publish under your own name. Editorial support, conference travel, and co-authorship on relevant work are defaults, not exceptions.

Sabbatical

We want this to be a career, not a sprint. Sabbatical eligibility scales with tenure.

Location

Remote. Syntony is based in Durham, North Carolina, with team growth planned across San Francisco, Washington DC, London, Brussels, and Singapore. These are the cities the work is heading toward. Working near a current or planned hub is helpful for periodic in-person collaboration, but it is not required. Geography is not a filter for the right person.

Apply

Apply for Member of Technical Staff

Email hello@syntonyresearch.org with the subject line "MTS | [Area] | [Your Name]", or use the form below. Include your work, the area you want to focus on, what you would want to build, and how you would want to be evaluated in your first 90 days.

Applications reviewed on a rolling basis.

Contact information
Professional background
Areas of focus (select all that apply)
Work and judgment

Syntony is committed to building a diverse team. We evaluate candidates on demonstrated ability and judgment, not credentials or pedigree. We strongly encourage applications from candidates whose backgrounds may not perfectly match the description. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability. We may use AI tools to assist with parts of the hiring process, including initial application review. Final hiring decisions are made by humans.