AI Resilience Partner

EQL Tech is partnered with Convergent Research in the search for an outstanding AI Resilience Partner. Convergent Research is a nonprofit science studio best known for pioneering the Focused Research Organization (FRO): purpose-built, mission-driven orgs designed to solve technological bottlenecks, unlock whole new fields, and lead to scaled revolutions. We’ve proven our model works by building over 14 high-impact scientific organizations spanning AI (here), biotech, mathematics, climate science, and more. AI capability is compounding faster than the world's ability to absorb it. Other technologies got decades to sort out their safety codes, their testing regimes, and the institutions that enforce them. We don't have decades. The defenses have to be built while the technology is still moving, and there's no budget line anywhere that says build the defenses now. That's the gap this role exists to close. Not "how do we build another AI company" — plenty of people are doing that. This role is about building the missing institutions and technical infrastructure that make the world resilient to advanced AI: the defensive capabilities that won't be built by a startup, won't fit inside an academic lab, and are too important to leave to chance. What you’ll do Partners at Convergent are like senior partners at a venture incubator. You'll create and fully own a growing portfolio of FROs and other scientific projects that advance AI resilience — society's capacity to capture AI's benefits while withstanding its risks. The portfolio is yours to define, but the surface area is much bigger than model safety alone. It spans defensive biosecurity (pathogen-agnostic detection, next-generation PPE, rapid countermeasures), provably secure cyber-physical systems and formal verification, epistemic infrastructure for a world flooded with AI-generated content, independent evaluation and monitoring capacity, compute governance, economic modeling of the transition — and areas nobody has named yet. The unifying question: what keystone defensive capability, if it existed, would make the world meaningfully harder to break? You will have extreme latitude to decide what your portfolio should include, and the resources to go build it. You’ll form strong theses, find extraordinary founders, pressure-test ideas, raise money, build boards, launch organizations, and help them move with the speed and focus of the best deep-tech startups. Specifically, you will: