Research Scientist, AI Safety and Security

Google; Singapore; On-site; SGD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Google is seeking a Research Scientist in Singapore to advance proactive threat mitigation, adversarial ML, and agentic security for next-generation AI systems. You will focus on ML foundations for AI safety, develop robust evaluation benchmarks, and collaborate with academic partners and regional engineers.

The role emphasizes continual learning, interpretability, and publishing cutting-edge research in top venues, contributing to trusted AI capabilities within Google’s global research efforts.

Qualifications

• PhD degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience in machine learning, adversarial ML or evaluating frontier AI systems, including supervised/unsupervised/reinforcement learning, ML interpretability, adversarial robustness, ML safety, generative models, agentic AI, multi-objective optimization.
• One or more scientific publication submissions for conferences/journals/public repositories (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.).

Responsibilities

• Drive foundational ML research in model robustness, continual learning, interpretability, and multiobjective optimization to advance trustworthy AI.
• Design and develop evaluation protocols, benchmarks, and stress-testing methodologies for frontier AI capabilities and multi-agent consensus.
• Curate advanced datasets and conduct fine-tuning or optimization experiments to enhance model resilience against emerging threats and ensure safety constraints.
• Collaborate with regional engineering hubs, core product teams, and academic partners to transition proofs-of-concept into robust production solutions.
• Publish groundbreaking research in ML venues and actively participate in academic/industry research communities.

Skills

Python

Machine learning

Publications

Education

PhD in CS or related field

Job description

Google will be prioritizing applicants who have a current right to work in Singapore, and do not require Google’s sponsorship of a visa.

Minimum qualifications

• PhD degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience in machine learning, adversarial machine learning or evaluating frontier AI systems, which includes but not limited to supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning, ML interpretability, adversarial robustness, ML safety, generative models, agentic AI, multi-object optimization.
• One of more scientific publication submission(s) for conferences, journals, or public repositories (such as CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc.).

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with general purpose programming languages (e.g., Python).
• Experience investigating emerging technical threats (e.g., automated scams, deepfake generation, or rogue agent vulnerabilities) and designing robust, proactive defense mechanisms.
• Demonstrated expertise in adversarial machine learning, AI agent security, data poisoning, prompt injection, and model backdoor detection.
• Strong background in applying a security mindset to artificial intelligence, including debugging complex ML failure modes, reverse engineering model behaviors, and red-teaming frontier AI systems.
• First-authored publications in top machine learning, safety/security tracks in machine learning or AI conferences, or HCI conferences.

About The Job

As a Research Scientist, you will join a specialized research effort dedicated to proactive threat mitigation, adversarial machine learning, and agentic security. Our team operates at the trustworthy AI, focusing on securing next-generation AI models and intelligent agents against emerging threats.

In this role, you will focus on the machine learning foundations of AI safety, developing innovative techniques, continual learning, and interpretability to prevent safety drift and enhance intrinsic model robustness. You will co-develop advanced evaluation benchmarks, working alongside academic institutions and global engineering teams to provide research that will form the basis of next-generation trustworthy AI capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Drive foundational machine learning research in model robustness, continual learning, interpretability, and multiobjective optimization to advance trustworthy AI.
• Design and develop rigorous evaluation protocols, scenario-based benchmarks, and stress-testing methodologies to assess frontier AI capabilities and multi-agent consensus.
• Curate advanced datasets and conduct fine-tuning or optimization experiments to enhance model resilience against emerging threats and ensure adherence to safety constraints.
• Collaborate extensively with regional engineering hubs, core product teams, and academic partners to transition theoretical proofs-of-concept into robust production solutions.
• Publish groundbreaking research in machine learning venues and actively participate in academic and industry research communities

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 ..