Program Director, Formal Methods

About the role

AI is changing the cyber resilience threat landscape from both sides. More capable models are making vulnerability discovery, exploit development, and complex attack chains faster, cheaper, and more scalable, while organizations are increasingly relying on AI systems that can be unreliable, difficult to validate, and deeply integrated into sensitive operations. The result is a widening assurance gap: more software, more capable attackers, and less time for defenders to find and fix what can go wrong. With the prospect of recursive AI self-improvement on the near horizon, the stakes of this status quo are about to grow astronomically, and we need to find solutions now.

Formal methods may offer one of the most promising ways to change this balance. AI’s speed can be directed toward producing verified defensive systems, while trust remains grounded in independently checkable evidence. If this works, defenders could retire entire classes of vulnerabilities rather than finding and patching them one at a time—and build stronger assurance into critical software, frontier AI infrastructure, and the constraints governing AI-enabled systems.

We are looking for a Formal Methods Lead to make this a central pillar of the Foundation’s cyber resilience program. You will act as the general manager for a fast-moving R&D initiative: set the Foundation’s formal methods R&D strategy, help coordinate an ecosystem spanning academia and industry, build the Foundation into the field’s leading philanthropic funder, and drive the best work from research to deployment.

This is a senior, full-time, zero-to-one leadership role with substantial autonomy and unusually short timelines. The threat landscape and technical frontier are moving quickly; you will need to form a view, place high-conviction bets, recruit exceptional people, and get significant work funded and underway in months, not years.

In this role, you will

• Set and own a focused formal methods R&D strategy for cyber resilience, identifying the highest-leverage bottlenecks and advising Foundation leadership and the board as capabilities and threats evolve.
• Build and execute a high-conviction portfolio of grants and contracts, sourcing exceptional people and programs and creating new vehicles where existing ones are insufficient.
• Launch rapid technical sprints and ambitious demonstrations on consequential systems, with clear milestones for scaling, changing, or stopping work.
• Knit together the ecosystem of formal-methods researchers and companies with frontier AI labs, critical-infrastructure operators, government, standards bodies, and other funders to accelerate deployment and adoption.
• Build and lead a small, exceptional team of technical experts and program builders, complemented by advisors, contractors, and AI-native engineering capacity.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have deep expertise in formal methods, equivalent to 5-10+ years of experience in the field, and broad judgment about the approaches, tools, institutions, and people across the ecosystem.
• Have applied formal methods to consequential real-world systems and understand the gap between a successful proof and a deployed, usable system.
• Have led a significant technical R&D program, organization, or cross-institutional effort from an ambiguous mandate to concrete results.
• Bring a strong network and trusted relationships across the formal-methods community, with the ability to mobilize both established leaders and overlooked teams.
• Understand how rapidly improving AI capabilities are changing both offensive cyber operations and defensive engineering, and can identify the bottlenecks that will remain.
• Are a high-agency operator who makes sound decisions under uncertainty, moves with urgency, recruits excellent people, and communicates ambitious ideas without overselling what the technology can guarantee.

We'd love to hear from you if you

• Have experience with industrial formal verification, high-assurance software, compilers, programming languages, systems security, cryptographic verification, or verified hardware.
• Have experience running an ARPA-style program, technical startup, open-source or standards effort, or a substantial portfolio of grants, contracts, or investments.

Compensation

The annual base salary range for this role is $300,000 to $370,000 USD.

This range reflects our good-faith estimate of the base salary we reasonably expect to pay for this position upon hire. Actual base salary will be determined based on job-related factors, including the candidate’s relevant experience, skills, expertise, the scope of the role, and work location, as applicable.

This salary range does not include benefits or any other compensation for which the role may be eligible.

Equal Opportunity

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.