Research Engineer, AGI Safety and Alignment, DeepMind

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 174,000 - 252,000; Full time

Job summary

Google DeepMind is seeking researchers embedded as software engineers to drive large-scale alignment and safety experiments. You will design and run experiments, prototype architectures, and collaborate with academic partners to publish findings while applying advances to real-world AI systems.

The role emphasizes bridging research and product teams, contributing to interpretability, safety, and robust AI deployment across diverse projects.

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 and study their effectiveness.
• Develop adversarially robust AGI control systems and deploy them in production.
• Research interpretability techniques to understand what AI systems are thinking.
• Work with product teams to ensure that research is correctly adopted.

Skills

3 years of software development / ML

Research collaboration experience

Education

Bachelor's in CS / related field or equivalent

Job description

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 fine-tuning, RLHF).

About the job:

At Google, research-focused Software Engineers are embedded throughout the company, allowing them to setup large-scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly. Ideas may come from internal projects as well as from collaborations with research programs at partner universities and technical institutes all over the world.

From creating experiments and prototyping implementations to designing new architectures, engineers work on real-world problems including artificial intelligence, data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilers for mobile platforms, as well as core search and much more. But you stay connected to your research roots as an active contributor to the wider research community by partnering with universities and publishing papers.

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.

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.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.Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. US: $174000 - $252000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities:

• Research new alignment methods, studying … .
• 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.