Founding Scientist

About the role

This is not a research-lab sinecure, and it's not a publishing post with a fancy title. The problems we need solved have no existing solutions in industry or academia. You'll work directly with our founder & CEO — whose decade of cryptographic research and patents underpin the company — to set the research agenda, then prototype, build, and ship it yourself.

Responsibilities

• Set the research agenda for the company, in direct partnership with the CEO.
• Solve and ship. Take problems from whiteboard to peer-review-quality design to production code — personally.
• Move at startup speed, with frontier AI coding and research tools as a force multiplier. We expect leverage, not headcount.
• Compound the moat. Translate your work into patents, publications, and influence over emerging agentic-identity standards.
• A computer scientist with real depth in two or more of: applied cryptography, security & privacy, machine learning / AI agents, formal methods, distributed systems. PhD preferred, not required — a track record of cracking genuinely novel problems matters more than the credential.
• A polyglot builder. You move fluidly across languages, stacks, and abstraction levels, and you ship your own ideas rather than handing off specs.
• Forged under constraints. You've done research where the clock was real — a startup, a competitive lab, an industrial team — and "interesting" was never enough; "working" was the bar.
• Drawn to the void. You're motivated precisely by problems with no literature to lean on, and by being the person the company counts on to find the answer anyway.
• A clear communicator. You can pitch a research direction to investors and review a cryptographic protocol line by line. Both happen here.

Requirements

• Fellowship-caliber distinction (Hertz, NSF GRFP, Churchill, or similar).
• Founder or founding-team experience — especially research-driven products or an acquired startup.
• Hands-on work with trusted execution environments, browser automation, agent frameworks, or authorization systems.

Qualifications

• Salary: $195,000 – $245,000
• Equity: 1.00% – 2.00%
• Unlimited PTO with a culture that actually encourages using it
• Wellbeing & professional development reimbursements
• Commuter benefits for getting to our SF office
• Employer-sponsored retirement savings (401k w/ matching)
• Employer-sponsored dental, vision, health, and life benefits

Benefits

• We are a registered public benefit corporation. That's not marketing — it's in our charter. The person who joins us will help build a company that takes the mission as seriously as the math.

Pay

$195,000 – $245,000

Schedule

Full-time