A cross-disciplinary team of builders, researchers, ethicists, and philosophers
Core Team
Austin
Co-founder / CEO
Austin McCaffrey
Co-founder / Chief Executive Officer
Austin leads the vision and strategy for Aurelius, bringing deep expertise in decentralized systems and AI alignment. His work focuses on building open infrastructure that ensures AI development remains transparent, accountable, and aligned with humanity's interests.
Coleman
Co-founder / COO
Coleman Maher
Co-founder / Chief Operating Officer
Coleman Maher brings nearly 10 years of experience leading growth and operations in the crypto industry to Aurelius. He held executive or senior roles at Babylon, Parity, Waves, and Origin Protocol. Coleman hails from San Francisco and studied mathematics at UC Berkeley.
Friedrich
CTO
Friedrich
Chief Technology Officer
Friedrich is the technical mind behind Aurelius, architecting the decentralized alignment infrastructure from the ground up. With deep roots in distributed systems and machine learning, Friedrich ensures the protocol is robust, permissionless, and built to scale.
Advisors
Dr. Robert West
Alignment Research
Professor, EPFL
Dr. Robert West
Advisor — Alignment Research
Heads the Data Science & AI Lab at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). PhD from Stanford. Research focus on AI safety, NLP, and computational social science.
Jack Hoban
Ethics
Dual Life Value Theory, USMC
Jack Hoban
Advisor — Ethics
Author of The Ethical Warrior, where he introduces the Dual-Life Value principle and natural law ethics. U.S. Marine Corps veteran who leads global workshops on ethics, leadership, and conflict resolution for military, law enforcement, and corporate clients.
Steffen Cruz
Alignment Engineering
CEO, Macrocosmos
Steffen Cruz
Advisor — Alignment Engineering
PhD in subatomic physics from the University of British Columbia. Former CTO of the Opentensor Foundation and core developer of Subnet 1, Bittensor's flagship subnet. Founder of Macrocosmos, a premier Bittensor ecosystem team developing Subnets 1, 9, 13, and 25.
Dr. Roland Aydin
Alignment Research
Professor, TU Hamburg
Dr. Roland Aydin
Advisor — Alignment Research
Assistant Professor for Machine Learning at T.U. Hamburg and Deputy Institute Director at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon. His research spans machine learning, computational mechanics, and materials science, with a methodological focus on large language models.
Ryón Nixon
Ethics
Founder, Horizons Law
Ryón Nixon
Advisor — Ethics
Founder of Horizons Law & Consulting Group. UCLA School of Law, federal clerkship in the Central District of California. Genesis external General Counsel for Solana with 10+ years in crypto law, advising projects including Synthetix and Akash Network.
AE Studio
Alignment Engineering
Alignment-oriented developers
AE Studio
Advisor — Alignment Engineering
AI alignment R&D lab with collaborations across Anthropic, Redwood Research, and Princeton. Research focus on mechanistic interpretability, AI consciousness, and LLM safety.
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
