I'm one of the people you described in the opening. I'm a CS senior at Yale, graduating in a few weeks. A few months ago I had an eye-opening conversation with a researcher at the Doudna CRISPR lab, and I've been pivoting toward biosecurity since. I don't have a bio background, but I've run a CRISPR-Cas9 experiment at Yale to gain hands-on understanding and am interviewing with an org in this space. Before this I spent a year at Palantir and Amazon working on healthcare and energy projects, but I am now looking to pursue roles with better impact.
I don't think I'm experienced enough for roles at SecureBio, but I'd love your advice on where someone with a CS background and my level of experience could be most useful right now. The SWE world seems to have changed quite a bit since you last wrote about this. Would appreciate a public response, or happy to chat briefly if you prefer. Thanks!
I've had a lot of people reach out to me who are interested in working on biosecurity, but have a background in software engineering / computer science. A lot of these conversations have looked something like:
This has now changed, and SecureBio is now hiring for two different software engineering roles that don't require a biology background:
NAO: Bioinformatics Engineer. An in-person role on the project I lead, developing a metagenomic biosurveillance system to detect stealth pathogens.
AI: Software Engineer, AI Safety and Biosecurity. A remote role on the project Seth leads, evaluating frontier AI systems, with a focus on biosecurity and misuse risk.
Consider applying?
Happy to answer questions!
Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, the EA Forum, mastodon, bluesky