SL5 Standards Lead

About Security Level 5
Security Level 5 is a Bay Area AI security nonprofit working with AI labs and US intelligence agencies to defend frontier models from priority nation-state-level threats. We're a small technical team, we move fast, and we're growing quickly this year.

The mission
Plausibly the most difficult, urgent, and interesting challenge in AI security engineering this decade (for humans, at least): designing the first datacenter purpose-built to Security Level 5, the standard for defending frontier labs against attackers with nation-state resources and billion-dollar budgets. We wrote v0.1 with input from frontier-lab CISOs and US security and intelligence officials. Now we're designing SL5 architectures for real AI workloads and standing up the reference stack to guide lab buildouts. First SL5 components this year, at-scale build in 2027. The stack has to hold against nation-states, keep researchers productive, stay within what labs can pay, and ship in 2-3 years.

The role
Lead the SL5 standard end to end. It's a NIST SP 800-53 overlay, with physical requirements from ICD 705, supply chain from NIST 800-161, across five streams: network, physical, machine, personnel, supply chain. The current version is a v0.1 draft with open questions and a roadmap of mappings (DoD IL6, FedRAMP High, CNSSI 1253). Keep it technically coherent and drive it from draft to something labs actually adopt.

What you'd do

• Lead versioning, control updates, and cross-stream coherence

• Find and fix flaws in the current version and drive its open questions to resolution

• Extend the mappings to IL6, FedRAMP High, and CNSSI 1253, plus the AI-datacenter and AI-SCIF overlays to ICD 705

• Gather lab, datacenter operator, chip provider, and government feedback, and translate their constraints back into the standard

• Make the required-vs-recommended-vs-deferred calls where security and adoptability conflict

• Set the writing and editorial bar for a document read by both deeply technical and senior policy audiences

You'd fit if you

• Have authored, owned, or led a technical standard, control framework, or comparable cross-cutting spec, ideally one real organizations had to implement

• Have deep security experience in more than one of: systems/network, physical/personnel, hardware/ML infra, government security frameworks

• Are fluent with NIST 800-53 / ICD 705 / IL6-class frameworks

• Write clearly and precisely for technical and policy readers

• Want your work to set the bar the whole industry builds to

Bonus

• Wrote or operated under classified or high-sensitivity frameworks

• Hold a clearance or are clearance-eligible

• Have standing relationships across frontier labs, the IC, or datacenter/chip supply chains

• Owned a standard that had to be both secure and adoptable under real cost and speed pressure

Logistics
Bay Area, in-person. Base salary $200,000-240,000. We may pay exceptional or highly experienced hires more. Full benefits: healthcare, dental, vision, 401k match, and more.