Member of Technical Staff (Berkeley, CA)

CivAI; Berkeley (CA); On-site; USD 125,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision, and life insurance

Catered lunch and dinner

Possibility of visa sponsorship

Job summary

CivAI, a non-profit based in Berkeley, seeks a Member of Technical Staff to innovate software demonstrations focused on AI. This full-time role requires creativity and technical proficiency, allowing you to design engaging presentations and interactive experiences that educate policymakers and the public about AI's implications.

The successful candidate will enjoy building complete projects and collaborating on impactful AI demonstrations, contributing to AI literacy and responsible use.

Qualifications

• Experience developing complete software projects, preferably full stack.
• An interest in how AI manifests in real-world applications.
• Comfort with experimenting with frontier AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Research, build, and refine software demonstrations about AI.
• Create new demonstrations that resonate with audiences.
• Communicate AI concepts through interactive software.

Skills

Full stack web application development

UI/UX design

Creative software engineering

Understanding of AI systems

Communication skills

Job description

About CivAI

CivAI is a non‑profit that educates policymakers and the public about AI risks using live software demonstrations. To date, CivAI has delivered 200+ briefings to organizations across civil society (on AI‑cyber risks, deepfakes, and elder fraud) and the US government (on biological risks, elections, and more). Its work has been featured on national television by ABC News and Scripps News, and in print by the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME, CNN, and many others.

About the role

As a Member of Technical Staff, you will research, build, and refine the software demonstrations that are at the core of what we do. These will explain both prosaic AI capabilities and more nascent ones that are fast approaching.

This role primarily involves creative software engineering, with flexibility across many domains like interface design, message testing, conducting user interviews, and interfacing with partner organizations.

We'd love to hear from you! If you have any questions about this role, please email us at [e-mail].

In this role, you will:

• Build our demonstrations from end to end, acting as an agentic, creative, and conscientious hacker on a collaborative team.
• Write quality software. That includes considered UI/UX, products that are robust to misuse, and performant code.
• Come up with new demonstrations that our audiences will find meaningful. See the Representative Projects section for more.
• Use a wide variety of frontier AI systems and tinker with them when necessary. ML engineering skills are not needed.
• Stay on top of AI progress in order to educate our audiences and inform new demonstrations. You will often read papers and prototype demos reproducing them.
• Iterate quickly on lightweight projects that pack a rhetorical punch, rather than toil for months on a surgical change to an enterprise codebase.
• Communicate understanding about AI through the software and its accompanying text, in the spirit of interactive explainers or data journalism.

You may be a good fit if you:

• Want to help the world understand AI's implications, so that future AI progress is deliberate and beneficial for humanity.
• Have built complete software projects that you're proud of, especially full stack web applications. These can be from jobs, side projects, hackathons, or internships.
• Enjoy brainstorming about creative ways to showcase how AI is going to manifest in the world.
• Enjoy gray‑hatting frontier AI systems.
• Care about perfecting the entire user experience, from the look and feel of the UI to the speed of the AI inference.
• Have an opinionated aesthetic sense of what makes a good software API or user interface.
• Are willing to roll up your sleeves and try everything to get something working, even when documentation is sparse and the path forward is unclear.

Representative projects

• A presentation for high level decision makers featuring several demos about loss of control to advanced AI systems, including our recent demo about emergent misalignment.
• A presentation for policymakers showing how frontier AI systems can be used for mass surveillance and bioweapons.
• Our policymaker demos suite, which starts with someone's LinkedIn and makes instant deepfakes of them using a combination of open models, writes personalized phishing emails with Gmail‑like UI, creates fake news Tweets and NYT articles, and more.

What this role is not:

• Since our work is primarily making demos and presentations, the role involves relatively little "production app" work like infrastructure management and job orchestration.
• We do not perform novel research ourselves. We follow and communicate research done by others and build mockups of existing systems like AI surveillance tools.
• We do not do ML engineering. The lowest‑level work we do is tinker with fine‑tuning and self‑host a few open models.

Salary and benefits

• The role is full‑time and on‑site at our office in Berkeley. We may be open to remote for exceptional candidates.
• The salary range is $125,000 to $200,000.
• We may be able to offer additional compensation to more senior candidates.
• Health, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• Catered lunch and dinner at our office every weekday.
• We may be able to sponsor visas in select cases.

CivAI is an equal opportunity workplace, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds regardless of race, color, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, socioeconomic status, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.