Jobs in Berkeley, CA

About the role

To do this, we are hiring both formal methods specialists and engineers with skills such as developer tools, scalable testing, agent development, AI/ML, and others that complement Oath's mission. Engineers may have skills in one or several areas, and our team will be tightly integrated, with both categories working together. Oath will target very difficult verification and oversight problems, far beyond previous formal verification projects in scale and complexity. Oath's research team will work iteratively, building tools, testing them on our flagship problems, identifying failures, and then feeding those back into our tool designs. We plan to build an Oath team of around six people by the end of year one, growing to a steady state of around twelve people by year three. Oath's roadmap runs for five years, and we’ll set more ambitious targets as the outcomes of our work and changes in the profile of AI risk evolve. This is a strong fit for people who want to tackle complex, high-stakes challenges in a nimble, collaborative organization. Oath's current plan is to build tools across three families: **design** (authoring new specifications), **lifting** (extracting specifications from existing systems that have none), and **audit** (stress-testing specifications for gaps or adversarial manipulation). We're applying these to a first flagship target, verified agent containment: proving that an AI agent can't escape the permissions and sandboxing meant to bound it, from the OCI container runtime down to Linux kernel isolation primitives. Most of this work will be done in Lean or adjacent formal-verification infrastructure, with AI agents doing much of the day-to-day drafting and proving under close review.

What you'll bring

• Experience building tools engineers actually adopt: IDE integrations, language servers, CLI tooling, build-system integration.
• Experience with AI-assisted developer workflows, agent scaffolding, or applied AI/ML engineering.
• Comfort picking up formal methods concepts on the job, even without prior depth in the area.
• Experience working in research and/or engineering teams delivering ambitious results.
• An ability to learn quickly, build quickly, and pivot when necessary.
• Experience using coding agents or other AI tools for ambitious technical projects.
• Knowledge of AI risks generally, and alignment with Oath's mission to counter AI risks.
• A broad enthusiasm for deeply technical topics, and a passion for ideas.
• Salary commensurate with relevant experience
• compensation is flexible for unicorn candidates.

Benefits