U.S. Policy Associate

The Role

We are looking for an early-career policy associate to help build our U.S. policy work: making the state of the art in AI verification legible in Washington, while ensuring verification engineers are building towards the policy objectives of governments. You will work closely with our Head of U.S. Policy and our technical team, and we will shape the scope of the role to the person we hire.

This work is critical and urgent: : incidents in frontier AI are rising, and developers want options to prove to one another and to governments that they are mitigating extreme risk. Lucid's tooling seeks to support this.

For example, we are retrofittinga 16-GPU H100 cluster in Sweden to create an adversarial testbed for verification mechanisms to go through repeated cycles of being built and then attacked by an independent red team, with the architecture and results open sourced. This is the quickest way to close the time needed from design to world class red teaming.

This role sits between our technical team and the people we work with in Washington. Externally, you will help give policymakers an accurate picture of what can be verified today, what could be with investment, what cannot, and what each option costs. Much of that is writing; the rest is making sure that when a government or partner asks us something, a good answer already exists. Internally, you will follow domestic frontier AI regulation closely enough to tell our researchers what governments are asking for, and keep the record of who we have spoken to, what they need and what happened next.

Responsibilities

• Track domestic frontier AI regulation, federal and state, and keep the team current on what matters for verification

• Draft briefings, public comments, explainers and responses to requests for policymakers, congressional staff, agencies and the wider governance community, giving an accurate picture of what AI verification can and cannot do

• Build and maintain a standard set of materials on Lucid’s work, so that a request from a government or partner gets a considered answer rather than a one-off demo

• Prepare the team for meetings with policymakers and partners and follow up afterwards: background research, briefing notes, and a record of what was agreed and what came of it

• Own the system for tracking engagement and outcomes with external stakeholders

• Work with the research and red teams to turn policy proposals into precise verifiable claims, and technical results into language a staffer can use

• Help with whatever else a small team needs, including grant applications and events

Requirements

• Experience in US AI or technology policy, whether in government, Congress, a think tank or a company’s policy function. A year or two, including fellowships and internships, is enough if you can point to something you made happen in that time rather than only tracked

• The ability to represent technical work accurately. You do not need to read a verification paper or system design unaided yet, but you need to be able to get there with some help, and to notice when you have got something wrong

• Writing that makes technical material accessible to non-experts

• Comfort operating with limited precedent, and a preference for building structure rather than inheriting it

Useful, not required

• A technical background in security, cryptography, hardware or distributed systems

• Familiarity with verification regimes in other domains, such as arms control or nuclear safeguards

• Experience making technical or policy work accessible to a wide audience across press, social media, multimedia and explainers, and a habit of pitching ideas rather than waiting for a brief

• Experience in standards bodies or multi-stakeholder governance

• Experience setting up and running the systems a small team depends on, such as a CRM for tracking relationships

• Existing relationships across the communities working on frontier AI oversight

The first 90 days

• A standard set of documents on what Lucid can verify today, what it could with investment and what it cannot, ready to share whenever a government or partner asks

• A working system for tracking engagement and outcomes with external stakeholders, with the last year of the team’s work recorded in it

• A tracker of the federal and state legislation and international proposals that bear on verification, with a view on which matter most

Practicalities

This role is based in Washington, D.C. Some travel to San Francisco, London and to policy and industry events should be expected. The base salary range for this role is listed above. Compensation also includes equity. Where you land in the range depends on experience.

If you think you would be right for this role but do not meet every requirement, we would still like to hear from you; tell us why.