Founding Member, Technical Staff

About the role

Neolithic is a nonprofit startup building tools and infrastructure to accelerate AI safety research — an engineering-first approach to reducing catastrophic risk from advanced AI. We are a newly founded nonprofit startup, funded to bring on our first two hires immediately. Joining this early means unusual ownership: you'll own projects end-to-end, work directly with researchers at the field's leading AI safety organizations, and shape what this organization becomes.

Our Mission

AI capabilities are advancing much faster than AI safety research. We believe this gap between the strength of AI and our ability to monitor, evaluate, and interpret it will determine whether advanced AI ends in catastrophe. Our mission is to close this gap by building open-source, agentic tools that uplift safety researchers and help automate the field. The AI safety field deserves first-rate tooling, built and maintained for free by a dedicated, mission-aligned organization with relentless attention to its evolving needs. Neolithic exists to be that organization.

Projects

• Active Rogue-Deployment Datasets: An automated pipeline that generates realistic samples of AI agents misusing their access inside a frontier lab's systems: training data for stronger cybersecurity monitors. (Redwood Research, 2025)
• Planned Evaluation Awareness Mitigation Tooling: Tooling for building realistic environments: raising environment realism until models can't tell they're being evaluated. (Needham et al., 2025) (Greenblatt et al., 2024)
• Planned Agent Infrastructure for Safety Research: Context-management systems and other plumbing that make safety orgs' research agents markedly more capable.
• Planned Automated Reward Hacking Detection: Tools that detect reward hacking in the RL environments foundation models are trained on, mitigating the emergent misalignment it causes. (Anthropic, 2025)

Why Join Us

If making AI go well is your obsession, come build with us. We are looking for individuals who want to contribute to building open-source tools and infrastructure that will help accelerate AI safety research.