ML Research Engineer, Trust & Safety

Realm Labs; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance

401-K

In-office lunch

Founding equity

Job summary

Realm Labs in Sunnyvale, CA is seeking a Founding ML Research Engineer focusing on trust and safety in large language models. This role involves individual contributions to ML research, applied ML, and software engineering within the office environment.

The ideal candidate has a PhD in a relevant field, hands-on experience with deep learning and programming skills. Total compensation package includes market-aligned pay and significant equity, alongside comprehensive health insurance and benefits.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated research experience with a PhD strongly preferred.
• Ability to identify research questions through literature review or experimentation.
• First-author or major contributor on peer-reviewed publications.

Responsibilities

• Designing and executing research experiments on LLM trust and safety.
• Building and managing systems end-to-end.
• Contributing to core product capabilities as a founding team member.

Skills

Research experience

Hands-on experience with PyTorch

Proficiency in Python

Deep learning model evaluation

Literature review skills

Education

PhD in a technical field

Tools

Jupyter notebooks

AWS

GCP

Docker

Job description

Founding ML Research Engineer, Trust & Safety

Sunnyvale, CA

AI/ML

In office

Full-time

Role Overview

This is an individual contributor role blending ML research, applied ML, and software engineering. Topics include trust and safety challenges for large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs):

• Prompt injection attacks and adversarial robustness
• Safety alignment and guardrails
• Privacy and confidentiality
• (Mechanistic) interpretability

Responsibilities

• Designing and executing research experiments on LLM trust and safety
• Reading, synthesizing, and producing research papers and technical write-ups
• Building, running, and owning systems end-to-end
• Contributing to core product capabilities as a founding team member

What We're Looking For

ML & Research

• Demonstrated research experience; PhD in a technical field strongly preferred
• Ability to identify relevant research questions and find answers through literature review or experimentation
• First-author or major contributing authorship on peer-reviewed publications; please list these on your resume or cover letter
• Hands‑on experience with PyTorch, HuggingFace (Transformers, Datasets), and applied deep learning
• Experience training and evaluating deep learning models
• Nice to have: LLM fine‑tuning, multimodal LLMs, PEFT/LoRA
• Nice to have: Familiarity with ML interpretability methods (mechanistic interpretability, sparse autoencoders, linear probes, NLP/Vision interpretability)

Software Engineering

• Proficiency in Python; experience with Jupyter notebooks
• Unix environments, Git, and basic AWS/GCP usage
• Nice to have: Programming languages well‑roundedness; experience with statically‑typed and functional programming languages
• Nice to have: Familiarity with (LLM) deployment tooling like Docker, vLLM, Triton Inference Server or similar

Logistics

• Available to start within 2 months
• Role may include limited on‑call responsibilities tied to production ownership

Compensation & Benefits

• Market aligned compensation and benefits.
• Founding equity (Equity is a significant component of this role and will be discussed).
• Medical, Dental, Vision, Life insurance, 401‑K, In‑office lunch etc.
• Base pay range: $200,000 – $260,000 per year.

Visa sponsorship

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