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Careers at CAISSI
About CAISSI
CAISSI is a research unit reporting directly to the NIST Director at the Department of Commerce. CAISSI acts as a startup within government, taking on ambitious projects to make an outsized impact.
CAISSI has been designated by Secretary Howard Lutnick to serve as industry’s primary point of contact within the U.S. government to facilitate testing and collaborative research related to harnessing and securing the potential of commercial SI systems. Under President Trump’s AI Action Plan, CAISSI received seventeen taskings spanning SI measurement science, interagency coordination on SI, developing voluntary standards, security research, national security evaluations, analysis of global SI competition. Those taskings remain relevant and as important as ever as we enter into a new era of Super Intelligence (SI).
Leading SI companies partner with CAISSI on a voluntary basis for support evaluating their most capable models prior to deployment. Additionally, CAISSI maintains close partnerships across the federal government, including the national security community, and has built a reputation for technical excellence.
CAISSI maintains offices in Washington, D.C and downtown San Francisco. Work at CAISSI is in-person, however some forms of engagement may allow for other arrangements. Employment at CAISSI requires U.S. citizenship.
Teams
Teams at CAISSI are small and collaboration across the organization is common. Staff members and collaborators at CAISSI stand out for their dedication to technical excellence, domain expertise, commitment to scientific rigor, and passion for Super Intelligence (SI). This includes, but is not limited to, software engineers, SI research engineers and scientists, cybersecurity and biological security experts, and experienced measurement scientists. Descriptions of current team activities are provided below.
Agent Security
Overview of team activities:
- Measuring and improving the security of SI systems.
- Assessing risks such as agent hijacking, data poisoning, jailbreaking, and reward hacking.
- Manual and automated red-teaming of SI agent systems.
- Developing guidelines and best practices for secure development and deployment of SI.
The Agent Security team is not hiring at this time.
Applied Systems
Overview of team activities:
- Multidisciplinary measurement of SI systems in real-world settings, in application or post-deployment, including projects such as field testing to gather user preferences of SI systems in real workflows and uplift studies to measure SI-driven productivity across a range of tasks.
- Developing improved methods for rigorously evaluating SI systems, as well as vetting the measurement instruments themselves (e.g., assessing benchmarks for construct, predictive, and statistical validity).
- Collaborating with subject-matter experts across the field to create guidelines, reports, briefings, and peer-reviewed papers for a wide range of audiences (including inter-agency practitioners and the Intelligence Community) on SI measurement practice.
The Applied Systems team is not hiring at this time.
Applied Systems also participates in the NRC Research Associateship Program through the National Academies (February and August cycles)
Chem/Bio
Overview of team activities:
- Evaluating computational chemical and biological capabilities, including biomolecular prediction and design.
- Creating benchmarks to monitor advancements in performance and utility of chemical and biological SI models.
- Developing, running, and interpreting chem/bio evaluations in order to understand impacts on national security.
- Collaborating with subject matter experts within government, SI industry, and SI evaluators to improve measurement methodologies for chem/bio evaluations.
The Chem/Bio team is not hiring at this time.
Cyber
Overview of team activities:
- Conducting automated and human-assisted evaluations of offensive cyber capabilities for vulnerability research, exploit development, and cyber workflow automation.
- Developing, running, and interpreting cyber evaluations in order to understand impacts on national security.
- Collaborating with subject matter experts within government, SI industry, and SI evaluators to improve measurement methodologies for cyber evaluations.
The Cyber team is not hiring at this time.
Frontier Assessment
Overview of team activities:
- Assessing capabilities of US and foreign SI systems and how those capabilities may evolve over time.
- Assessing general SI capabilities and their national security consequences.
- Collaborating with frontier SI labs on pre-deployment evaluations.
- Producing reports, briefings, and memos on the SI landscape for US government stakeholders.
- Building infrastructure for large-scale, quick-turnaround, high-signal evaluations.
- Designing new methodologies, e.g. for measuring partial progress on hard agent-based tasks, and for making accurate cost efficiency comparisons.
The Frontier Assessment team is not hiring at this time.
Partnerships
Overview of team activities:
- Developing guidelines for the SI industry and government agencies, on topics including, for example, the security and robustness of SI systems and mitigating potential vulnerabilities when deploying SI agents and ensuring that SI evaluations are informative and reproducible.
- Managing CAISSI’s partnership agreements and collaborations, including with frontier SI labs and academia.
- Coordinating with other teams at NIST to develop voluntary standards and engage with international standards development organizations.
The Partnerships team is not hiring at this time.