Senior Researcher, Civil Safety Sciences

CARMA is looking for a Senior Researcher, Civil Safety Sciences. You'll help shape CARMA's Civil Safety Sciences program portfolio by anticipating novel hazard classes, advancing next-generation detection and resilience approaches, identifying safety technologies whose earlier maturation shifts the offense-defense balance, and weaving the scientific coordination that lets dispersed researchers function as a coherent field. You'll work under the direction of the Executive Director while running projects with significant intellectual autonomy.

Contract terms: CARMA works through a US fiscal sponsor, so US-based hires are employees; candidates outside the US are engaged as independent contractors. No visa sponsorship.

• Conduct structured horizon-scanning for novel AI-enabled hazard classes, and develop methodologies for reasoning rigorously about threats that lack historical base rates or established scientific communities
• Investigate next-generation detection sciences, such as dynamic and adaptive pathogen surveillance, and analogous open-ended approaches for other emerging hazard modalities
• Pursue feasibility analyses on deep resilience and lifeline capacities engineered to function when conventional infrastructure, sunlight, or centralized coordination cannot be assumed
• Analyze biosphere-scale vulnerabilities, including geoengineering, synthetic microbes for terraforming or remediation, and nontraditional environmental toxicology arising from AI-enabled activity
• Identify and selectively advance defensive, stabilizing, and transparency-enhancing technologies whose differential acceleration favors humanity
• Develop scientific metaresearch on how evidence is generated, aggregated, and translated into action where conventional empirical feedback loops are weak
• Build scientific coordination capacity through standards, convenings, and cross-border working relationships, and equip frontline responders and community networks with usable decision support
• Co-author grant applications, build analytical tools that make catastrophic risks more legible, and translate findings for policymakers, technical audiences, and the public
• Collaborate across CARMA programs to integrate civil safety perspectives with broader risk assessment, governance, and technical safety workstreams

• Advanced degree (PhD or >1 MS preferred) in a hard-science or engineering discipline, with demonstrated breadth across multiple natural science fields
• Strong candidates may come from any of, or combinations across: biosecurity, microbiology, ecology, environmental or atmospheric science, agricultural and food systems science, chemistry, materials science, physics, public health, biomedical or systems engineering, resilience engineering, security sciences, or related fields
• Substantive familiarity with adversarial environments and adversarial reasoning, broadly construed: grounded in security studies, biosecurity, cybersecurity, defense analysis, red-teaming, safety engineering, dual-use technology assessment, or comparable experience reasoning rigorously about deliberate misuse and worst-case dynamics
• Demonstrated ability to reason carefully about hazards that lack robust historical data or settled detection paradigms
• 5+ years of relevant research or applied experience, with a track record of running independent projects from framing through delivery
• Strong publication record or equivalent body of work on technological risk, resilience, detection science, or related domains
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with proven ability to translate technical content for policymakers, funders, and non-specialist audiences
• Systems thinking and comfort with substantial uncertainty and rapidly shifting knowledge landscapes
• Substantive grounding in modern AI capabilities and trajectories, sufficient to anticipate how advancing AI reshapes threat and defense landscapes in your areas of work
• Self-directed, with sound judgment for identifying high-leverage problems under broad rather than micromanaged direction

Apply through CARMA's application form on Lever, using the Apply button on this page.