Head of Research Partnerships & Standards

The Role

We are looking for a Head of Research Partnerships & Standards to build the relationships that turn Lucid's verification work into shared infrastructure.

Verification only matters if others can check it. That requires research institutions willing to test and extend our designs, and standards bodies willing to adopt the specifications that come out of them. Our collaboration with the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE), an adversarial testbed on a live GPU cluster whose results are published openly, is the first of these partnerships. This role owns that relationship and builds the next ones.

Responsibilities

• Own Lucid's research partnerships, starting with RISE, from scoping and agreements through to delivery and publication

• Source and structure new collaborations with universities, national labs, AI safety institutes and frontier AI developers

• Represent Lucid in standards and governance forums working on verifiable compute, including the Verifiable Compute Foundation, and drive specifications from draft to adoption

• Work with our research and engineering teams to turn results into reference architectures, specifications and papers that others can build on

• Identify and secure grant and non-dilutive funding tied to research partnerships

• Build the function as it grows

Requirements

• Substantial experience managing research collaborations or technical programs between organizations, such as academia–industry, public–private or multi-lab consortia

• A record of taking a technical specification or standard through a formal body, or equivalent multi-stakeholder process

• Enough technical depth to engage credibly with hardware, cryptography and security researchers, or a demonstrated record of getting there quickly

• Strong writing for technical and non-technical audiences

• Comfort operating with limited precedent, and a preference for building structure rather than inheriting it

Useful, not required

• Experience with standards bodies such as ISO/IEC, IETF, OCP, IEEE or NIST processes

• A research background (PhD or equivalent) in security, systems or a related field

• Experience with grant-funded programs and their reporting

• Familiarity with arms-control or safeguards verification

• A genuine interest in AI safety and the problem verification exists to address

This role may be based in San Francisco or London, and we're open to remote for exceptional candidates. Some travel to partners and industry events should be expected. Compensation is competitive and includes equity.