Program Officer / Senior Program Officer, AI and Biosecurity

Program Officer / Senior Program Officer — AI and Biosecurity

Sentinel Bio works to make pandemics history within our lifetimes by finding, funding, and scaling the best efforts to secure biotechnology. Since launching in 2024, we've raised more than $50M in unrestricted philanthropic capital and deployed it across more than 70 grants, special projects, and incubated organizations focused on safeguarding AI-enabled biology and DNA synthesis.

How to apply

If you are excited about our mission, fill out our expression of interest form here. We will review applications on a rolling basis. After initial screening, strong candidates will be asked to complete a compensated work test.

Why this role exists

Our AI and biosecurity program exists to reduce the risk of AI enabling catastrophic pandemics. It currently covers three connected risk surfaces: biological data, the biological AI models trained on it, and the AI agents that are increasingly able to develop, recreate, and orchestrate those models. It contributes to Sentinel's overall win condition: "in our lifetime, no malicious or reckless actor uses advanced biotechnologies to create and release pandemic pathogens."

We are hiring one or more exceptional people as we rapidly scale our work to effectively deploy $100M by 2030, to reduce these risks and achieve a safe and innovative future for biotechnology.

We are open to hiring at two levels of seniority depending on your experience – Program Officer and Senior Program Officer. You'd work with our AIxBio Program Director, Toby Webster, a former emergency physician who came to Sentinel via work at RAND Europe on the governance of biological AI.

We do whatever it takes to achieve our mission, and enjoy significant flexibility in how we operate. We can incubate new entities like BioTrust, which is building third-party trust infrastructure for managed access to bio-capable AI models, and we are currently incubating two more organizations to fill similar gaps. We can commission policy or technical research programs when a question is blocking progress, and work with policy and advocacy groups to move a promising idea forward. We work closely with others who share our goals in governments, AI labs, biological AI developers, academia, funders, and the private sector, and we aim to take ultimate responsibility for the gaps in our own agenda. This means finding the people who can own each piece, and asking the questions that need answering on a short timeline.

What you’ll own

• Shaping and executing the strategy. You will own a substantial part of our AIxBio strategy and execute it. You will learn fast as we shape and deploy the most promising interventions at the frontier.

• Building what's missing. Working out what has to exist for this to work, then making it happen: incubating an organization, commissioning research that unblocks a decision, or running the engagement and convening yourself.

• Relationships across the portfolio. Earning trust with the people who shape this field in government, industry, and research.

• Grants. Owning end-to-end investigation and management of millions of dollars of grants in your first year.

Who We're Looking For

• To work independently. When given a hard, loosely-defined, constantly changing problem, you make a plan and start.
• Good prioritization and strategic judgment, and the composure to reprioritize and adapt a strategy as the field and the evidence changes.
• A talent for building relationships and earning trust quickly, including with people more senior or more technical than you, and with people whose beliefs about this problem and approaches to it are very different from yours.
• Excellent writing and communication skills.
• At least basic familiarity with capability and risk questions in biological data and biological AI models, and in frontier general-purpose AI.

What we'd expect you to learn at Sentinel:

• Good grantmaking practice and how the funding ecosystem works, the deeper technical and policy detail in whichever areas you end up going deep on, with access to excellent advice from our network and colleagues.

What We Offer

• Compensation: $123k - $153k (Program Officer) and $140k - $170k (Senior Program Officer)
• Competitive benefits: Unlimited paid time off, generous parental and family care leave, healthcare and retirement contributions; personal and professional development budget, workspace membership, travel.
• Location: Near London, Washington DC, or San Francisco are preferred but location is flexible. Toby Webster, who you will report to, is located in London, UK. We have a base office in DC in a co-working space that has a presence in London, San Francisco and beyond, and you will have colleagues in all these cities as well as Amsterdam. Occasional travel (approximately quarterly) to DC, London, or San Francisco is likely to be a requirement.

About Sentinel Bio

We are a small, high-trust team that moves quickly, takes our work seriously, and holds ourselves to a high standard. Impact on our mission is the bottom line we use as our North Star. When the path forward is unclear or difficult, we turn to these guiding values for inspiration and motivation:

• Unwavering integrity: We seek and speak the truth even when it is costly to us.
• Relentless prioritization: We diligently deploy our precious resources, including our time, funds, and the trust of our partners.
• Calibrated humility: We recognize our limitations without overstating them and generously share both credit and opportunities for impact with others.
• Sustainable ambition: We pursue the mission to our limits but no further, seeking the assistance we need and embracing that we will sometimes fail.

Sentinel Bio is led by Claire Qureshi, who has over 15 years of leadership experience in biotech, global health, public policy, and consulting, and Joshua Monrad, who has deployed philanthropic grants for tens of millions of dollars and helped build several new biosecurity institutions. We have strong partnerships with a geographically diverse group of philanthropists who share our long-term mission, and we're on track to raise and deploy $100M by 2030.

Referral Bonus

Know someone who'd be a great fit? Please get in touch via our referral form, where we offer a $5,000 bonus to individuals who refer successful candidates.