Vertical Lead

Strong ability to combine technical fluency, product intuition, and customer understanding into high value, repeatable solutions.

Strong understanding of modern AI technology.

Deep domain experience in a vertical where companies are training models (or attempting to).

Come with a perspective - we want to hear it!

Technical degree or equivalent professional experience within AI or Research

Track record of excellence in a high growth startup.

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.

The expected salary range for this position is $250,000 - $375,000 USD.

Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to join a vital mission at an important point in its trajectory — we are developing groundbreaking technology with a world-class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity. If you want to do your life’s work with us, even if you believe you do not meet every single requirement, apply now.

We’re looking for a Vertical Lead to own and scale a vertical.

This role demands an unusual range: the technical depth to architect novel solutions, the leadership to direct a team of engineers and research scientists, the emotional intelligence to form successful partner relationships, and the vision to launch and scale a new market.

This is an incredibly challenging and exciting role where you will operate like a founder: translating our platform into solutions and products, defining the market, and proving product-market fit.

That means owning what we build, sell, and deliver, leading a forward-deployed team to create solutions, and managing partner relationships end to end: from scoping and sale through delivery and expansion.

This role turns frontier research into real-world impact, allowing our advances in the science of interpretability to unlock the promise of safe and powerful AI.

You will typically be working with frontier companies in one of Life Sciences, Robotics and Vision, general Language and Reasoning models, or new verticals that we may focus on.

Goodfire is a research company using interpretability to understand, learn from, and design AI systems. Our mission is to build the next generation of safe and powerful AI—not by scaling alone, but by understanding the intelligence we're building.

Scaling has proven powerful, but today's approach is fundamentally limited: we can't meaningfully understand, debug, or shape what models learn. Every engineering discipline has been gated by fundamental science and AI is at that inflection point now.

We're advancing the science of how AI systems actually work. Treating models as black boxes is an unnecessary handicap—we have access to the structures inside them, and understanding those structures lets us steer what models learn, make them safer and more useful, and extract the vast knowledge they contain. Our goal is to make AI that can be understood, debugged, and shaped like software.

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco with a team of the world’s top interpretability researchers and engineers from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind. We're backed by over $200M from B Capital, Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed, Eric Schmidt, and others.