Credentialing Lead
A founding credentialing role owning BioTrust's vetting pipeline and shaping how high-stakes access decisions get made.
- Commitment
- Full-time. We're hiring on either a fixed-term contract or a permanent basis, depending on fit and your situation. We're happy to start as a contract and convert. For the contract path we want to move fast, so ideally you can start immediately.
- Location
- Bay Area and in person for the permanent role, with potential flexibility for contractors. We're open to discussing visa support for the right person.
- Compensation
- $150-250k + equity for the permanent position, depending on experience and seniority.
BioTrust is building the trusted-access layer between frontier AI labs, AI-bio tool developers, gene synthesis providers, and the researchers who use them. We verify once and let researchers be trusted across providers, reducing friction for legitimate science while creating a defensible screening layer against catastrophic misuse. We're working with a leading frontier AI lab, and are incubated by Sentinel Bio as we spin out into a standalone for-profit public benefit corporation.
We're hiring a Credentialing Lead to own our vetting pipeline and help shape its methodology. This person should enjoy the nitty gritty of researching organizations and making vetting decisions. They should also have strong judgement to iteratively improve our process. The work currently looks more like grantmaking, assessing use case and team credibility. This is a founding seat: you do the work yourself now, and as we grow you'll build the methodology and the team that scales it.
You will be part of an ambitious, high velocity, mission-focused team that is in the trenches on directly mitigating AI misuse. From this vantage point, you will build the infrastructure for sustainably preventing AI and biosecurity risks.
What you'll do
- Review and make decisions on organizations applying for access. For each one, you work through the organization and its people, the use case, evidence of scientific credibility, signals on signature posture and trust, to reach a clear, defensible recommendation.
- Do the manual research to complement and validate our automated tooling, including careful open-source digging on the people and organizations behind each application.
- Run structured interviews with applicants to gather more information and resolve key uncertainties.
- Build out the methodology. Our scoring framework is live and evolving, and you'll shape the criteria for decisions and improve our pipeline for surfacing relevant information.
What this job actually looks like
A real organization can take the better part of a day to review properly, with hours of open-source research before you reach a view. We're building automation and tooling to speed this up, but the human stays central: the automation has to be validated through fully manual searches, and even once it's working, automated returns still need a person to review and decide what matters.
The work is detailed, repetitive in its rhythm, and cognitively demanding in its judgment. We want someone with very strong judgement to shape the system who also likes turning the crank on the cases themselves.
What we're looking for
- Excellent judgment. You can look at a messy set of findings and see what matters and what's noise. This may benefit from previous experience in grantmaking, reviewing research projects for safety or security risks, or intelligence/investigations.
- Genuine enjoyment of the detail, while keeping up high velocity. A large fraction of this role is methodical review work. You should find this satisfying. However, we will have many applications, so you will also have to move through cases efficiently and with high velocity.
- Comfort getting up to speed on the biosecurity and AI risk space. You don't need to be an expert on day one, but you need to learn it and reason inside it.
- Strong, clear writing. Your output is a recommendation someone relies on.
Nice to have
- A life sciences or biosecurity background.
- Experience in intelligence, investigations, due diligence, or security clearance work.
Ready to apply?
Tell us about your experience, what draws you to BioTrust, and the role you want to help shape.
For questions, email jonas@sentinelbio.org.