Program Director, Formal Methods

AI is already changing how people work, learn, and access care. It has the potential to unlock extraordinary benefits—faster medical breakthroughs, accelerated scientific discovery, more personalized services in healthcare and education, new tools for creativity and invention, higher productivity and economic growth, improved public services like transportation systems, and so much more. But building powerful systems to benefit humanity is only a part of the work of our mission. Advanced AI models will also present new challenges that are already surfacing, and we need to be prepared to identify these challenges and develop solutions to address them.

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Applied formal methods to consequential real-world systems and understand the gap between a successful proof and a deployed, usable system.
• Led a significant technical R&D program, organization, or cross-institutional effort from an ambiguous mandate to concrete results.
• 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.
• 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.

Skills

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

Pay

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.