Description
TaskUs partners with pioneering technology companies to build the safety, intelligence, and human-in-the-loop operations powering next-generation artificial intelligence.
In this role, you will join a specialized life-sciences pod supporting one of the world’s foremost frontier AI companies. The mission is vital: prevent state-of-the-art AI systems from lowering technical barriers to the creation or proliferation of biological weapons and catastrophic biological risks.
As a Senior Biology Specialist, you will evaluate complex, high-consequence escalations, separate legitimate scientific work from actionable risk, mentor Junior Specialists, and produce the high-fidelity labels used to validate and train automated safety classifiers at scale.
What You Will Do:
- Tackle Complex Escalations: Review and adjudicate nuanced, high-severity cases escalated from automated detection queues and Junior Specialists across priority biosecurity risk vectors.
- Deep Dual-Use Evaluation: Apply advanced scientific reasoning to distinguish legitimate academic, medical, or diagnostic research from actionable, weaponized biological pathways.
- Review & Mentorship: Perform quality assurance (QA) on casework completed by Junior Specialists, provide constructive technical feedback, and help lead regular calibration sessions to ensure consistency across the pod.
- Appeals & Policy Enforcement: Evaluate customer appeals, document detailed evidence-backed rationales for enforcement actions, and recommend policy determinations.
- Ground-Truth Labeling: Generate precise, defensible case annotations that serve as gold-standard benchmark datasets to measure and fine-tune internal automated safety filters.
- Reporting & Escalations: Synthesize technical findings into clear risk assessments for the Principal Biology Specialist and client safety leads, escalating novel threat patterns or ambiguous boundary cases promptly.
What You Bring:
- Advanced Degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) in Microbiology, Virology, Molecular Biology, Immunology, Synthetic Biology, Biosecurity, or a directly related discipline.
- 5+ years of professional experience in biodefense, biosecurity policy, biosafety oversight, public health threat surveillance, or BSL-3 laboratory operations.
- Applied Threat Fluency: Deep technical familiarity with high-consequence human, animal, and plant pathogens, toxin production pathways, and the Federal Select Agent Program guidelines.
- Dual-Use Discretion: Proven ability to discern benign educational or defensive life-science questions from illicit protocol formulation with partial or fragmented user input.
- Mentorship & Quality Standards: Demonstrated capability to peer-review scientific analysis, maintain operational labeling consistency, and mentor junior colleagues.
- Communication: Strong technical writing skills with the ability to summarize complex microbiological mechanisms into concise, actionable risk memos.
- Location & Authorization: Based in the United States with unrestricted work authorization.
Benefits:
- Competitive industry salaries
- Comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401(k) with company match
- Paid time off including vacation, sick leave, and holidays
Salary Range: $100,000 - $160,000 per year