Co-Founder

About the Responsible AIxBio Collaborative

R-ABC is a new nonprofit working to make the world a safer place by reducing the misuse risk of AI-enabled biological tools. We do that by catalyzing and accelerating governance for AI x bio: bringing into being the standards and shared resources that don't exist yet. Our stakeholders are the world-leading frontier companies, platforms, and research groups building AI for the life sciences. We work with them directly, not around them. R-ABC was founded in 2026 and is still small.

Ryan Ritterson founded and leads R-ABC. He spent a decade at Gryphon Scientific running biosecurity and biosafety risk assessments, including work on gain-of-function research and the security side of AI-enabled biotech. He's published widely on biorisk and dual-use governance, and sits on NIST's AI Safety Institute Consortium and NTI's AIxBio Global forum.

About the Role

R-ABC needs a co-founder. We've built a two-year plan, secured initial funding, and have about ten workstreams launching by the middle of next year. Now we need someone to help lead what comes next.

This is real shared leadership. Decisions, external relationships, hiring calls, and owning it when something goes sideways.

We haven't split the work into fixed lanes yet, on purpose. Right now things move faster than they can be categorized. We want two people who can look at what's in front of them, split it up, and go. Lanes will form as we grow.

What You'll Do

Share leadership, genuinely

• Own decisions and consequences: Make real calls across strategy, stakeholders, hiring, and positioning, and carry the weight when they don't work.

• Be a thought partner: Pressure-test thinking, offer a second read on hard calls, and be available for the unstructured back-and-forth that makes decisions better.

• Divide work in the moment: Look at what's coming this week, decide together who takes what, and own your half without waiting for it to be formally assigned.

Build the field

• Convene the stakeholders: Help bring together the world’s most influential frontier AIxBio companies to encourage, enable, and catalyze their safety work.

• Build the governance foundation: Shape the standards, best practices, and shared resources that AI x bio governance currently lacks. Very little of this exists yet.

• Represent Responsible AIxBio Collaborative externally: Hold relationships with stakeholder organizations, funders, policymakers, and the broader AI and biosecurity community.

• Read the landscape: Analyze and forecast where the technology and the policy environment are going, and adjust what we're doing accordingly.

Stand up the work

• Take workstreams end to end: Own several of the workstreams coming online, including ones that don't exist yet and need to be built from zero.

• Spot what's missing: Notice the gaps nobody has named and either fill them or flag them.

• Trade off honestly: Help decide what the Responsible AIxBio Collaborative does, and just as importantly what it declines, while the desire to do everything is strongest.

Build the organization

• Hire the early team: Help find, assess, and close the people who'll define what this place is.

• Set the culture deliberately: Work with the Executive Director and Chief of Staff to put Responsible AIxBio Collaborative's values into words early.

• Scale past yourselves: Help move Responsible AIxBio Collaborative from founder-led execution to something that runs without either of you in every room.

Who You Are

• You've operated at this level: You've held senior leadership responsibility somewhere, and you know what it takes.

• You care about growing people: Mentoring early hires into future leaders matters to you, not as a management technique but as something you actually believe in.

• You're hands on, especially early: Right now there's no team to delegate to. You're doing the actual work, not just directing it.

• You want to build, not inherit: You're looking for the version of this where the org chart, the strategy, and the culture are still unwritten.

• You disagree productively: You'll challenge the Executive Director's thinking, defend your own, and change your mind when you're wrong.

• You know this landscape: You have credibility and relationships in AI, biosecurity, technology policy, or an adjacent field. The Executive Director covers bio, so depth on the AI side is especially valuable.

• You're mission-driven: You care about the outcome here enough to take on the risk of an organization that is a few months old.

• You can hold uncertainty: Responsible AIxBio Collaborative is small, new, and operating in a field that changes monthly. Priorities will shift.

Nice to Haves

• Founding experience: You've started an organization, a program, or a major initiative and seen it through the ugly middle part.

• Multi-stakeholder convening: You've brought competing organizations to a table and gotten something useful out of it.

• Technical fluency: You can engage substantively with people building AI systems or working in the life sciences, without needing everything translated.

• Fundraising: You've raised philanthropic or institutional money, or you're willing to learn fast.

• Policy and standards work: You've been part of building standards, frameworks, or governance structures somewhere they didn't previously exist.

• Distributed leadership: You've led across time zones and have opinions about what makes that work.

What Success Looks Like

• The world is a safer place: AIxBio leaders are directly reducing risk, best practices and norms are spreading, and policymakers are acting to build and solidify oversight based on our efforts

• The bottleneck moves: Decisions stop waiting on one person's bandwidth.

• Decisions get better: Not just faster. Two people arguing well produce better calls than one person deciding alone.

• Coverage doubles: Responsible AIxBio Collaborative shows up in twice as many rooms, with twice the relationships, without losing coherence.

• The org outgrows its founders: A year in, Responsible AIxBio Collaborative functions as an institution rather than as one person's project.

Salary and Working Arrangement

Compensation for this role is expected to range from $185,000-$260,000, depending on experience and qualifications.

Responsible AIxBio Collaborative is fully remote with no offices. We provide an allowance for a home office setup or co-working space, whichever you prefer. We're open to candidates outside the US, though we have a slight preference for US-based for this role given the nature of the work. All else equal, we're happy to work across time zones for the right person.

Interview Process:

We know applying takes real effort, so here is what to expect.

• Application review: Our recruiting partner reviews every application.

• Screening conversation (20 minutes): A call with our recruiting partner covering your background, what you're looking for, and what this role involves day to day.

• Conversation with the Executive Director: A discussion with Ryan Ritterson, Responsible AIxBio Collaborative's founder, about the work, the field, and how you think.

• Final conversations: A conversation with a senior reviewer from Sentinel Bio, our founding funder, to bring an additional perspective into the decision.