We are hiring for exceptional engineers and scientists

Our worldview

Almost no one has priced in what is about to happen. Even startups that say that they believe in transformative AI don't act that way. As we get closer to a world where the cost of writing software goes to zero, it becomes more important than ever for hackers to be mindful of what they work on.

AI safety is the most impactful thing one could work with at this point in time. If the development of AI goes right, most of humanity's biggest problems (diseases, poverty, energy, etc.) will be solved. But there are many potential missteps with consequences ranging from "missed opportunity" to "doom". In our view, AI safety is not opposed to AI progress, it is the key to it.

Our work

Andon Labs builds Safe Autonomous Organizations (SAO) without humans in the loop.

Silicon Valley is rushing to build software around today's AI, but by 2027 AI models will be useful without it. The only software you'll need are the safety protocols to align and control them.

We are building the Safe Autonomous Organization. We iteratively launch and scale autonomous organizations, while bridging AI control research with real-world testing. We bring AI control research out of the lab to our currently deployed organizations.

Our first SAO — a vending machine at Anthropic's office — was covered by WSJ, Time and 60 Minutes. Now also at xAI, OpenAI and elsewhere.

Our benchmark Vending-Bench is used at every major model release (Anthropic, Google) and has uncovered misalignment — findings that changed how later Claude models were trained to be more aligned (Opus 4.8 system card).

Our latest SAOs are live in the real world: a store in San Francisco, a café in Stockholm, and radio stations broadcasting 24/7. They all run on Pion, the platform we built to let agents run businesses autonomously, now available to the public as a research preview.

We have a front row seat to the frontiers of AI through our own experiments and our collaborations with the AI labs.

Roles

We're looking for research scientists, research engineers, software engineers, and design engineers to build this future. Things move fast, which makes specifying the exact responsibilities of roles hard. Below are the three areas of work we are currently most interested in:

We don't believe model alignment will be guaranteed as capabilities increase. Nor will humans be able to stay in the loop and keep up with every step an agent takes.

Your role would be to design and run evals that probe AI behavior in real-world deployments — figuring out what to measure, interpreting results, and having the research taste to know what experiment to run next. You'd also help implement control protocols to keep our SAOs safe.

What should be our next SAO? A farm? An AI lab? Or maybe a chip fab?

AI safety can't be solved in the lab. We need our SAOs to be everywhere in society. You would have the role of 20 startup founders, at once. Concretely, this means identifying interesting ventures, building agentic systems with integrations to the real world, and deploying our agents.

What should the interface between humans and autonomous organizations look like?

As a Design Engineer, you answer this question by owning the user experience of Pion. You obsess over design and craft, and take ideas all the way from design to implementation. You’re also comfortable building features in our backend. Our tech stack is a SvelteKit frontend, with a Python backend and Postgres database.

Compensation: $120k–$180k salary and $300k–$900k in equity.

We're based in San Francisco (in-person only).