About Sequent
Sequent is a new AI alignment research organization, founded in 2026 by researchers from the UK AISI’s Alignment Team and Timaeus. We aim at higher a priori confidence in aligned outcomes by pursuing a portfolio of theory and empirics bets, any one of which, if it succeeds, would meaningfully advance the field. We invest heavily in research automation to accelerate progress, and we believe that theory unlocks higher automation: more principled approaches give us better filters for which directions of automated research are promising.
For more information, see our announcement.
About Our Research
We work across a portfolio of research areas, currently including:
- Scalable oversight: empirical work on protocols (debate, recursive reward modeling, prover-verifier games) that allow weaker overseers to supervise stronger systems, paired with complexity-theoretic work on equilibria and reachability.
- Complexity theory: theoretical work on modeling the interaction of superintelligent agents with lower complexity training environments, including applications to scalable oversight, heuristic arguments, and other agendas.
- Learning theory: singular learning theory and its applications, deep learning theory, computational mechanics, etc.
- Personas: theory and empirics of low-dimensional structure within model behavior across training and token dimensions.
The full set of bets has not yet been finalized but, in the future, may include further agendas like:
- Heuristic arguments: mechanistic understanding of what models know, low-probability estimation.
- Game theory: mechanism design, agent foundations, open-source game theory.
A cross-cutting focus is Research Automation: building infrastructure and tooling to scale all of the above by leveraging AI research assistants at every level of the stack, across both theoretical and empirical work.
About the Team
Sequent’s work will involve sensitive frontier-relevant research and partnerships with AI labs. This role exists both to protect that work and to enable it: good security is what makes deeper lab partnerships possible. We draw a distinction between two closely related areas of security:
- Research & infrastructure security. Securing how research actually runs: CI/CD pipelines, automated research agents, multi-cloud compute, and code/data/model-weight handling.
- Corporate IT & security. The endpoint, identity, and collaboration scaffolding a distributed research org runs on, in combination with the compliance frameworks that unlock lab partnerships.
This role focuses on the latter, covering security on the operational side of the organization. You would report to senior leadership and work closely with our security and operations teams (as well as with our engineering team).
In practice, we expect to grow the security team one hire at a time, so your initial set of responsibilities is likely to span both areas. We expect the distinction to clarify over time.
About the Role
We are looking for a hands-on, strategic leader to build and own our Corporate IT and Security function from the ground up. As we scale from our current team to 40 to 60 FTEs over the next two years, you will be the single point of accountability for ensuring our researchers have the tools they need to move fast while maintaining a security posture that earns the trust of external partners and AI labs.
We are looking for a builder, not just a manager. You should be comfortable getting into the weeds of configuration and implementation, but you understand that your ultimate goal is to enable world-class research through secure infrastructure.
Responsibilities
1. Secure Research Infrastructure (Endpoint & Device Management)
- Design and deploy a secure-by-default environment for a diverse workforce, spanning in-person teams in Berkeley and remote researchers globally.
- Manage endpoint security (MDM/EDR) for a hybrid fleet, ensuring that researchers can interact with high-value research code and data safely without sacrificing velocity.
2. Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Implement a robust Zero-Trust architecture. You will define the lifecycle of identities for our staff, collaborators, and automated research agents.
- Ensure rigorous access control management, balancing the open-science nature of our publication goals with the extreme sensitivity of our pre-publication research and model access requirements.
3. Communications and Email Security
- Secure our communication channels. As an organization that may become a high-value target for state actors and competitive intelligence gathering, you will implement advanced email security, phishing protection, and secure collaborative workflows.
4. Security Architecture as an Enabler
- Act as the primary bridge between our research needs and the security requirements of external AI labs.
- Help us navigate the security audits required to gain and maintain access to frontier models, turning compliance into an accelerator for our research agenda.
You May Be a Good Fit If You
- Are a hands-on operator with a technical background and are comfortable configuring systems, scripting automation, and personally setting up the stack.
- Understand the threat model of a high-stakes research organization and can balance extreme security with an AI lab’s “move fast” requirements.
- Have built an IT and/or security function from scratch and can operate with autonomy and ambiguity in an early-stage org.
- Can translate technical security requirements into plain English for researchers, theorists, and leadership.
- Are familiar with compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001) and partner-lab security requirements.
- Are willing to use AI tools aggressively in your own workflow, with appropriate care to not get fooled!
- Are motivated by alignment of artificial superintelligence (ASI) and want to contribute to it full-time.
Why This Role is Unique
At most organizations, IT and Security are viewed as overhead. Here, your work is a core component of the research strategy. By securing our operations, you enable the collaboration and external partnerships that allow our researchers to access sensitive models and data to accelerate progress. You will help define the operational security standards for a new generation of AI safety organizations.
Logistics
- Location: Berkeley strongly encouraged; London is a secondary hub; remote may be considered in exceptional cases.
- Visa sponsorship: Yes, for relocation to Berkeley
- Start date: Rolling
Expression of Interest
We expect to open a full hiring round soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in roles at Sequent, please fill in this Expression of Interest form.