Research Engineer, AGI Safety and Alignment, DeepMind

Google DeepMind; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Google DeepMind’s AGI Safety and Alignment Team (ASAT) seeks researchers and engineers to advance alignment techniques for frontier models. You will contribute to safety research, build robust control systems, and collaborate with product teams to ensure safe and effective deployment across platforms.

The team focuses on misalignment sources, safety frameworks, and evaluating risk with executives, shaping research that reduces existential AI risks while enabling safe innovations for billions of

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related Software Engineering field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3 years of experience in software development, ML engineering, or ML research.
• Experience working with research teams.

Responsibilities

• Research new alignment methods, studying alignment failures, and applying AGI-scalable alignment techniques to frontier models.
• Develop adversarially robust AGI control systems and implement them in production.
• Research interpretability techniques to understand what AI systems are ‘thinking’.
• Work with product teams to ensure that our research is correctly adopted.

Skills

Software development.

Research teamwork

Applied ML research

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related Software Engineering field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3 years of experience in software development, ML engineering, or ML research.
• Experience working with research teams.

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related Software Engineering field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3 years of experience in software development, ML engineering, or ML research.
• Experience working with research teams.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience conducting or contributing to applied research to improve the safety and alignment of frontier AI systems.
• Experience with training large models (e.g., supervised finetuning, RLHF).

About The Job

The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Safety and Alignment Team (ASAT) aims to reduce existential and catastrophic risk from AGI and eventually Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). We research novel techniques and work with the rest of GDM and Google to apply them. We advise executive leadership on safety.

ASAT has sub-teams specialising in making future Geminis more thoroughly aligned by finding and fixing sources of misalignment and exploring alignment techniques with better generalization. Preparing for future AGI risks by simulating them today and using interpretability techniques to understand AI and solve practical problems like model forensics or eval awareness. Building control for GDM’s agents as defense-in-depth against potential misaligned internal deployments. Researching training techniques, like debate, for aligning superhuman AI and ways to retain, improve, and measure monitorability. Researching and implementing ways to assess the ways in which a given model might be imperfectly aligned and developing and implementing tools and AI assistance that accelerates safety research. Advising executive leadership on risks posed by AI systems via the frontier safety framework based on our threat models and evaluations.

We are prioritising hires for deep alignment, alignment stress testing, language model interpretability, agent control, and amplified oversight. We are looking to grow our team with researchers and engineers. Depending on your background, we have opportunities available as both Research Scientists and Software Engineers.

Artificial intelligence will be one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. At Google DeepMind, we are a pioneering AI lab with exceptional interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing AI development to solve complex global challenges and accelerate high-quality product innovation for billions of users. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, ensuring safety and ethics are always our highest priority.

We are pushing the boundaries across multiple domains. Our global teams offer diverse learning opportunities and varied career pathways for those driven to achieve exceptional results through collective effort.

Responsibilities

• Research new alignment methods, studying alignment failures, and applying AGI-scalable alignment techniques to frontier models.
• Develop adversarially robust AGI control systems and implement them in production.
• Research interpretability techniques to understand what AI systems are ‘thinking’.
• Work with product teams to ensure that our research is correctly adopted.

Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form .