Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer, Safeguards Research

United States Digital Space LLC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 350,000 - 500,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC seeks an engineer to own the infrastructure behind Safeguards research, building tooling, pipelines, and interfaces that accelerate experiments and improve reliability.

You will work between research and production, solving large-scale systems challenges while expanding machine learning expertise and ensuring the systems stay aligned with policy commitments.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and Python proficiency.
• Experience building and operating data-intensive or distributed systems in production.
• Experience building tooling or infrastructure used as a dependency by other engineers.
• Comfort working across the research-to-deployment pipeline, from experiments to production systems.
• Ability to debug performance and correctness across unfamiliar stacks.
• Strong written and verbal communication and collaborative decision making.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale the infrastructure and data pipelines behind Safeguards research
• Own training, evaluation, and scoring workflows with a focus on reducing cycle time
• Design tooling and interfaces researchers can use directly without deep systems knowledge
• Build correctness and sanity checks into the stack for trustworthy results
• Take high-value research workflows from experiments to production-grade jobs
• Improve throughput, cost, and reliability of large-scale inference and scoring workloads
• Partner with researchers and engineers across Safeguards to anticipate needs

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Tooling

Research-to-prod pipeline

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Experiment tracking

Caching layers

Evaluation harnesses

Job description

About the company

the company’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

the company's Safeguards team builds the systems that detect and mitigate misuse of our AI models, from individual policy violations to sophisticated, coordinated attacks. A growing part of that work depends on lightweight detection methods trained on model internals, which let us identify harmful behavior cheaply and at scale. This work feeds directly into the company's Responsible Scaling Policy commitments.

We're looking for an engineer to own the infrastructure behind that research. This is the tooling our researchers rely on to run experiments, train detection methods, and select detections for launch. It sits between research and production: researchers depend on it for fast iteration, and our detection systems depend on it for reliable, correct results as our models continue to change.

Running machine learning workloads at our scale often requires solving novel systems problems. You'll identify those problems and build the abstractions, pipelines, and tooling that keep the research loop fast as requirements shift underneath you. Strong candidates will have a track record of solving large-scale systems and data problems and will be excited to grow deep machine learning expertise alongside it.

Key responsibilities

• Build and scale the infrastructure and data pipelines behind Safeguards machine learning research
• Own the training, evaluation, and scoring workflows researchers use, with a focus on cutting the time between an idea and a result
• Design tooling and interfaces, including libraries and command line tools, that researchers can use directly without needing to understand the systems underneath
• Build correctness and sanity checking into the stack, so results stay trustworthy as models and workloads evolve
• Take the highest-value research workflows from experiments to reliable, production-grade jobs
• Improve the throughput, cost, and reliability of large-scale inference and scoring workloads
• Partner closely with researchers and engineers across Safeguards to understand their workflows, anticipate how their needs will change, and design for that ahead of time

Minimum qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands‑on coding ability, with proficiency in Python
• Experience building and operating data‑intensive or distributed systems in production
• Experience building tooling or infrastructure that other engineers or researchers use as a dependency
• Comfort working across the research‑to‑deployment pipeline, from exploratory experiments to production systems
• Ability to debug performance and correctness problems across an unfamiliar stack
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and a collaborative approach to technical decisions

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with high‑performance, large‑scale machine learning systems
• Familiarity with language modeling and transformers, including working with model internals
• Experience with machine learning framework internals, GPU or accelerator programming, or inference optimization
• Experience building experiment tracking, caching layers, or evaluation harnesses for research teams
• Experience with probes, interpretability, or classifier development
• Interest in the misuse risks of AI systems and a desire to work on mitigating them

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below.

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary: $350,000 — $500,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed. Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that the company recruiters only contact you from the company.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of the company. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate the company recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links— visit the company.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At the company we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact — advancing our long‑term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI — rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We’re an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on.