---
title: 'VP of Engineering at Transluce'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-engineering-transluce-san-francisco-m3yzxzmhekj5'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# VP of Engineering at Transluce

- **Company:** Transluce
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/transluce/am9icG9zdDr-Pg6BHWC21IpVDjuSH3Ez

## Job description

Salary range: $500,000 - $600,000/year + benefits

Description: Transluce is a non-profit research lab building the world's infrastructure for understanding AI. We do this through foundational research to discover and measure emerging high-stakes behaviors of AI systems, delivered through scalable products and influential public evaluations. Our work already shapes how AI is built and how it's governed: our agent-analysis platform, Docent, was used in Claude's safety analysis and is integrated with core agent benchmarks like SWE-bench, while our evaluations are directly underpinning regulation, including our role as EU AI Office’s main evaluation developer for harmful manipulation risks.

About the role: We're hiring our first dedicated engineering leader to build the engineering function Transluce needs for its next stage of growth: from 20 people (14 technical) to 40+ by mid-2027. Our central bet is to use AI to understand AI, using both scaffolded off-the-shelf agents as well as specialized agents trained internally. Our engineering work spans product, AI systems, and research infrastructure, and is tightly integrated with our research function. We are looking for a strong, technically-oriented engineering leader; expertise in AI or research are a plus, but not required.

Core responsibilities:

- Drive technical and operational excellence across the engineering function and broader org through culture, process, and systems
- Hire and retain an industry leading technical team to advance Transluce’s mission
- Build engineers’ and managers’ careers across the org
- Work with technical staff and leadership across Transluce to create strong clarity and alignment around goals, priorities, and roadmaps, at both the org-level and team-level
- Manage competing priorities and identify and explain trade-offs, advocating for what’s best for the organization
- Clearly communicate Transluce’s mission, strategy, and technical direction internally and externally; know how each new hire would come to the team and contribute to that vision
- Facilitate effective collaboration within and across teams
- Set vision and prioritization for core infrastructure; work with senior engineers to design the overall platform/technical stack

Qualities of a strong candidate:

- Able to operate on a 12+ month time horizon for organizational design, technical strategy, and overall org theory of change
- Can hire and inspire senior engineers, researchers and managers by being someone they can learn and grow from
- Articulates and argues for a clear perspective, but is prepared to disagree and commit
- Past experience in a similar role: taking a small, fast-growing company from 20 to 40+ as a senior leader working with one or more layers of management below them
- Strong management skills with an ability to both directly line manage teams and mentor and lead managers
- Not afraid to get into the technical details where relevant, but also able to make good decisions without knowing every detail

We are located in San Francisco and enthusiastic to work together in-person. We are open to sponsoring international visas.

## About Transluce

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Transluce is a nonprofit research lab building the open-source technology stack for scalable, public oversight of AI systems.
- **Entity Type**: Nonprofit (Private, Independent Research Lab)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jacob Steinhardt (Co-founder & CEO), Sarah Schwettmann (Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Safety Research / Interpretability
- **Target customers**: Frontier AI labs, governments, and the broader public; their tools are designed for use by independent evaluators, policymakers, and researchers.
- **Mission**: To build the infrastructure for understanding AI, steering its development in the public interest, and enabling a public science of model behavior.

## Products & Services
- **Activation Oracles**: A scalable, AI-driven interpretability tool for understanding model behavior, shown to improve with model size, data quality, and data volume. Research paper published on scaling to trillion-parameter models. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
- **Mental Health Evaluation**: The most expansive independent evaluation to date of how leading AI models respond to users in mental health crises, published in August 2026. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
- **Oversight Assistant Platform**: An end-to-end system for AI oversight, designed to help researchers and evaluators analyze model behavior at scale. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (nonprofit organization).
- **Key Metric**: Team size of 22 employees, with **109.1% yearly headcount growth** (LinkedIn). Funded by philanthropic donors; specific funding amounts are not publicly disclosed.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: 
  - **Mike McCormick**: First Funder and Board Member [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
  - **Common Sense Media**: Independent technical research partner for the Youth AI Safety Institute (announced May 2026) [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Expanding from 20 employees to 40+ in the next year (July 2026 hiring announcement) [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
  - Published two major research papers in August 2026 (on Scaling Activation Oracles and Scaling Laws for Exact String Elicitation) [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
  - Recruiting for high-level roles including VP of Engineering, signaling rapid scaling [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/transluce)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Independence & Public Interest Mandate**: Operates as a truly independent, nonprofit lab with no commercial conflicts — they have a published Independence and Transparency Policy and a Responsible Disclosure Policy [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/about).
- **Open Source & Scalable Tech**: All tools are built open-source to allow public vetting and improve reliability, a key differentiator from proprietary black-box audits.
- **Talent Magnet**: Attracts alumni from top AI labs and organizations including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Carnegie Mellon University. Their alumni go on to roles at Google DeepMind, Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, and other key institutions [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling Interpretability**: Training larger models and developing tools that work on trillion-parameter systems [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/).
- **Public Science of AI**: Building an open scientific ecosystem where evaluations and methods are publicly vetted and reproducible.
- **Government & Industry Partnerships**: Engaging with frontier AI labs and governments to ensure internal assessments match publicly vetted standards.
- **Youth AI Safety**: Research partnership with Common Sense Media for the Youth AI Safety Institute, focusing on how AI models behave in mental health contexts [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-Driven Work**: Directly contribute to AI safety and public understanding of a technology with extraordinary societal consequences.
- **Growth Trajectory**: Explosive headcount growth (109% YoY) with aggressive hiring plans (doubling team to 40+ in the next year) means significant impact and career acceleration for early employees [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).
- **Workspace**: In-office at HQ in San Francisco, California (1301 Sansome St). Employees work from a physical office with a strong emphasis on in-person collaboration [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/transluce).
- **Culture**: Described as a place where you "run the systems that let the technical team focus on AI safety research" and create "clarity out of ambiguity" — suited for motivated generalists and technical experts alike [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).
- **Open Roles** (as of Aug/Sep 2026): VP of Engineering, AI Behavior Engineer, Operations Generalist, Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Full-Stack Product Engineer, AI Systems Engineer, Research Engineer - Scalable Interpretability [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/transluce).

## Sources
1. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
2. [transluce.org/about](https://transluce.org/about)
3. [linkedin.com/company/transluce](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
4. [builtin.com/company/transluce](https://builtin.com/company/transluce)
5. [jobs.gem.com/transluce](https://jobs.gem.com/transluce)

## Other roles at Transluce

- [Business Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-manager-transluce-san-francisco-0wqvya5tm7cv) — San Francisco, CA
- [People Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-manager-transluce-san-francisco-rerrmd8ypmpq) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Behavior Researcher - Agent Alignment](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-behavior-researcher-agent-alignment-transluce-san-francisco-71m857j6ac40) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Engineer - Oversight Foundations](https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-oversight-foundations-transluce-san-francisco-tggwq73gfg0s) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Behavior Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-behavior-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-mr9gkhnfhpyr) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Behavior Researcher - Human Impacts](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-behavior-researcher-human-impacts-transluce-san-francisco-07997m7d0kkp) — San Francisco, CA
- [Governance & Policy Fellow](https://feeny.ai/job/governance-policy-fellow-transluce-san-francisco-dejeq9hbc6sc) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-systems-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-21qzm98xjn4t) — San Francisco, CA
- [Full-Stack Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-product-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-akrtqqxqthmn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Scientist/Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-research-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-afzb68nfx83b) — San Francisco, CA