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 roadm