Technical Leadership Team: Nexus Universe

Frontier technologies are entering critical national systems faster than their interactions, dependencies and failure modes can be tested. Nexus Universe is being established to close that gap.

The Global Centre for Risk and Innovation (GCRI), a fiercely independent, non-partisan public-interest institution with Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) since 2023, is forming the founding technical team for the first cycle of Nexus Universe.

Nexus Universe is an annual global build, test and evidence program designed to establish a temporary distributed high-performance computing, high-speed network, data and frontier technology environment. Emerging technologies will be assembled, integrated, stress-tested and benchmarked against systemic risks and national priorities under controlled conditions. The environment will then be decommissioned, with the resulting evidence converted into research, standards, technical baselines, lessons and future deployment pathways.

The objective is clear: test assumptions before adoption, expose systemic dependencies before they become structural, and generate evidence that can help institutions prioritize and de-risk national portfolios of strategic technologies, critical infrastructure and resilience capabilities.

We are recruiting one founding technical volunteer cohort across six specialization tracks.

Contributors may work across architecture, software, infrastructure, experiments, models, benchmarks, research, standards, policy and live mission operations.

HPC and GPU systems, distributed computing, cloud and sovereign compute, edge computing, storage, schedulers, high-speed networking, AI-RAN, O-RAN, private wireless, 5G and 6G, satellite and non-terrestrial networks.

Frontier and foundation models, agentic AI, multimodal systems, machine learning, scientific AI, data engineering, knowledge systems, simulation, digital twins, optimization, model evaluation, AI safety and decision intelligence.

Cybersecurity, zero trust, identity and access, secure systems, cyber ranges, cryptography, post-quantum security, confidential computing, blockchain, DePIN, verifiable computing, software supply-chain security and resilient digital infrastructure.

Earth observation, GIS and geospatial intelligence, remote sensing, sensors, IoT, OT and IIoT, robotics, drones, autonomous systems, telecommunications, energy, water, transport, health, food systems and critical infrastructure.

Systemic and emerging risk, national security, technology policy, foresight, resilience, standards, regulation, public-sector innovation, economic security, scenario design, infrastructure strategy, portfolio analysis and the translation of technical evidence into policy, investment and strategic decisions.

Systems architecture, platform engineering, DevSecOps, interoperability, product and program leadership, testing and benchmarking, observability, research design, evidence engineering, technical documentation, field operations, developer ecosystems and end-to-end mission integration.

We are seeking people already working close to the frontier, including:

• Engineers, architects and technical leaders at major technology companies and frontier startups
• Founders, builders and experienced operators
• Researchers, scientists and laboratory specialists
• Master's and PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers and advanced graduate students
• Public policy, standards, national security and technology governance specialists
• Open-source contributors and experts in critical infrastructure and complex systems

This is not a general-interest volunteer program. We are looking for people who can build, research, test, integrate, secure, model, govern or lead substantive work.

Contributors will help translate global risks and national priorities into concrete technical programs. This may include designing architectures, building infrastructure and software, developing experiments, integrating technologies, creating benchmarks, stress-testing systems, evaluating failure modes and producing evidence that can inform future policy, investment and deployment decisions.

The first cycle will address questions such as:

How should sovereign AI be tested before national dependency becomes structural? How do compute, telecom, energy and cyber risks compound? What happens when autonomous systems enter critical infrastructure? Which frontier technologies are ready for national-scale deployment, and which assumptions must be challenged first?

Nexus Universe is designed to turn those questions into systems, experiments, benchmarks and evidence.

This is an unpaid volunteer role. Contributors participate alongside their existing employment, academic or research responsibilities. Participants must ensure that their involvement is compatible with their employer, university or institutional obligations and must not contribute proprietary, confidential or restricted material without authorization.

We are looking for people prepared to help build a new global public-interest capability for testing frontier technologies against global risks and national priorities, de-risking strategic portfolios, and turning frontier research and engineering into evidence for consequential national decisions.