Research Scientist

Center for AI Safety

$170K — $220K *
Education, Government & Non-Profit
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Ph.D. in computer science, machine learning, or related field.
  • 5+ years of research experience in related areas.
  • Proficient with frameworks and libraries such as PyTorch and Hugging Face.
  • Experience implementing and training distributed machine learning jobs.
  • Publication co-author on NLP or RL papers in prestigious conferences.

Responsibilities

  • Lead research projects focusing on AI safety and ethical considerations.
  • Develop research directions and strategies for safer AI systems.
  • Write and submit articles for top conferences.
  • Collaborate with internal researchers and external academics.
  • Utilize compute clusters to conduct large-scale experiments.

Benefits

  • Health insurance for you and your dependents.
  • 401(k) plan with 4% matching.
  • Unlimited PTO for a work-life balance.
  • Free lunch and dinner provided at the office.
  • Commuter Benefit program to ease transport costs.
  • Annual stipend for learning and development opportunities.
Full Job Description
As a Research Scientist here, you will lead and execute high-impact research that advances the safety and reliability of frontier AI systems. You9ll design and run experiments on large language models, build the tooling needed to train and evaluate models at scale, and turn results into publishable research. You9ll collaborate closely with CAIS researchers and external academic and commercial partners, using our compute cluster to run large-scale training and evaluation. The work spans areas like AI honesty, robustness, transparency, and trojan/backdoor behaviors, aimed at reducing real-world risks from advanced AI systems.

Key Responsibilities Include:

  • Own end-to-end research experiments.
  • Train and fine-tune large transformer models across domains.
  • Build and maintain datasets and benchmarks.
  • Run distributed training and evaluation at scale.
  • Write and ship research, collaborating with co-authors, and supporting submissions of papers to top conferences.
  • Collaborate with researchers and external partners while contributing to shared research direction and responding quickly in research cycles.
  • Mentor and guide others on the team.


You might be a good fit if you:

  • Are a current PhD student or researcher in machine learning or a related field. Exceptional candidates with a strong publication record may be considered regardless of degree level.
  • Have co-authored at least one paper published at a top ML conference venue (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, CVPR). Workshop papers are considered, though peer-reviewed conference publications are strongly preferred. Publications in journals such as IEEE or Springer Nature are typically given less weight.
  • Have a track record of empirical research in AI or ML, particularly in AI safety-relevant areas (e.g. adversarial robustness, calibration, benchmarking). We weight empirical research heavily; candidates with primarily theoretical backgrounds are generally not a strong fit.
  • Alternatively, have made meaningful research contributions at a leading AI lab.
  • Are able to read an ML paper, understand the key result, and understand how it fits into the broader literature.
  • Are comfortable setting up, launching, and debugging ML experiments.
  • Are familiar with relevant frameworks and libraries (e.g., PyTorch).
  • Communicate clearly and promptly with teammates.
  • Take ownership of your individual part in a project.


$170,000 - $220,000 a year

Benefits:

Health insurance for you and your dependents

401K plan + 4% matching

Unlimited PTO

Lunch and dinner at the office

Annual Professional Development Stipend

Access to some of the top talent working on technical and conceptual research in AI safety

Know someone who could be a great fit for this role? Submit their details through our Referral Form. If we end up hiring your referral, you9ll receive a $1,500 bonus once they9ve been with CAIS for 90 days.

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