Field Specialist – AI hardware security and verification in Sheffield

Amodo is a hardware engineering company building the 21st century’s most important technologies. Our team of mechanical, electronic, firmware, and software engineers works with world-leading startups, universities, governments, and philanthropists to solve pressing technical challenges. We believe in differential technology development: deliberately accelerating safety-enhancing technologies to ensure human flourishing.

We’re looking for a Technical Lead to join our AI Security hardware workstream. You’ll work on developing hardware architectures that help verify and secure advanced AI systems. This is an impactful role at the intersection of hardware engineering and AI security. You will be a part of building a world‑class team and helping to shape a critical area of the company’s work.

What you’ll do

• Your mission: Help build the hardware foundations for AI systems we can actually trust.
• In your first weeks you’ll follow this framework for turning high-level AI goals into engineering work plans under guidance from senior leadership:
• Enumerate scenarios for how AI could go.
• Identify intervention points in bad scenarios and write a scenario with a desirable end state.
• Turn the intervention point into a set of claims about the AI systems’ development or deployment.
• Turn the claim into an engineering problem statement.
• Create a deployment sketch (assess how the engineered solution goes from idea to real‑world impact).
• Create a specification.
• Combine the deployment sketch and the specification into a work plan.
• Build. Depending on the deployment sketch, build a prototype, write a whitepaper, launch a startup, etc.
• Build the network. Help us become the team AI labs, policymakers, and governance researchers call when they want to talk about hardware for AI verification.
• Scope and shape projects. Join conversations with AI safety researchers, labs, and funders. Understand their technical challenges around verification and security. Turn these into engineering work plans that Amodo can deliver.
• Lead delivery. Work alongside Amodo’s engineers to build systems that work. Support client communication, translating between AI security requirements and hardware implementation.
• Grow the team. As the workstream expands, you may have the opportunity to hire and mentor engineers.

About you

We value drive, culture fit, and a track record of excellence above all else, but the competencies, interests, and attributes below are highly desirable:

• Self‑motivated, with a track record of taking parts of projects from concept to completion without hand‑holding.
• Strong technical foundations in electronic engineering, physics, or a related discipline, with the ability to rapidly learn new domains from first principles.
• Able to communicate complex technical ideas clearly to both engineers and non‑technical stakeholders, including funders, policymakers, and clients.
• Experience designing and building hardware systems, ideally with exposure to secure hardware, cryptographic implementations, or trusted computing.
• Curious about AI and its implications, ideally with some exposure to AI safety, AI governance, or security research.

Alongside the above, the below competencies will strengthen an application:

• Experience with FPGAs, secure enclaves, TPMs, or hardware root‑of‑trust architectures.
• Familiarity with compute governance, verification approaches, or the AI safety policy landscape.
• A hacker mindset: you prototype quickly, red‑team effectively, and learn by doing. Ideally you have projects to share with us.
• Prior startup or early‑stage company experience.
• Published work, open‑source contributions, or side projects demonstrating technical depth.
• Experience managing or mentoring engineers.

This role is ideal for someone who wants to do meaningful technical work on one of the most important problems of the decade, with real autonomy and the opportunity to grow alongside a talented team.

We can pay your professional institution fees. Weekly maker evenings (tools, budget and pizza provided).