Research Engineer, AIUC Labs

Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual salary

Equity

Health insurance

Visa sponsorship

Daily meals

Job summary

Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) is seeking an engineer-researcher to shape the strategic direction of our frontier AI risk program in San Francisco. You will own questions guiding 3-5 year roadmap, build confidence infrastructure, and turn our work into publishable research and open discourse.

You'll work directly with the founders to draft experiments, interpret results, and advance our public research program, including podcasts and writings that broaden our influence in AI

Qualifications

• Strong engineering ability to design and build research code and experiment pipelines (≤140 chars).
• Ability to read an ML paper and implement it quickly for research questions (≤140 chars).
• Ability to iterate and experiment quickly, turning ambiguity into tractable experiments (≤140 chars).
• Background in ML/CS through engineering and research (≤140 chars).

Responsibilities

• Own the questions that decide the strategic direction of AIUC over 3-5 years (≤140 chars).
• Take confidence infrastructure upstream to the model layer and ensure independent standards meet release decisions (≤140 chars).
• Turn AIUC’s work into publishable research and shape our public program, including podcasts and writings (≤140 chars).

Skills

Research engineer

ML background

Experimentation

Independent coding

Education

B.S./M.S. in CS/ML or related

Tools

Python

PyTorch

Experiment pipelines

Research tooling

Job description

About AIUC

AIUC builds standards and insurance for frontier AI. Our mission is to Underwrite superintelligence. We exist because risk, not capability, is becoming the binding constraint on AI being useful. History offers lessons for how to build confidence in new technology; electricity burned down houses until insurers funded Underwriters Laboratories (UL) to certify products against their standards. Today, the UL mark is a trustmark on every light bulb in America. We're building that for AI.

AIUC-1, our standard for agent security, serves frontier builders like Cursor, Lovable, ElevenLabs, and Harvey. We've raised $55m from Ribbit, First Harmonic and Nat Friedman to audit frontier AI. Our team comes from METR, Anthropic, McKinsey, and OpenAI. Come join us.

The Role

Superintelligence raises imminent questions:What models are safe to be released? How is the progress of recursive self-improvement audited? How should lab incentives be shaped? Who governs self-sovereign agents and what should incident forensics look like? Fortunately, researchers, auditors, hackers and actuaries have grappled with older versions of these questions for decades across nuclear energy, electricity, and car safety.

AIUC applies that same combination to AI. AIUC-1 lets us underwrite the world's first agent insurance policy. We hold eval data across the most-used AI agents, a team with both frontier AI and traditional risk experience, and a consortium of Fortune 1000 security leaders.

Answering these questions in time means combining frontier AI research with risk tools that already work. That's why we're founding AIUC Labs - a research lab which will exist so that AIUC and the world at large is on the frontier in navigating AGI. You will work directly with the founders to build out a new function and publish research that will guide the industry on what's next.

In this role, you will:

• Own the questions that decide the strategic direction of AIUC: where AI capability & risk goes over the next 3-5 years, what replaces evals as agents get more capable, whether models behave differently when they know they are being tested, and how AI shifts the offense-defense balance in security

• Take confidence infrastructure upstream to the model layer, where independent standards, rigorous evaluation and third-party assurance have to meet the release decisions labs are making now

• Turn what AIUC has actually done into evidence, publish research and shape our public research programme, including the podcast and writing, that increases our influence in the space

What we're looking for

• You're a strong engineer, and can design and independently build, debug, and maintain research code and experiment pipelines.

• You can read an ML paper and implement it quickly, and extend or adapt it to a new research question.

• You can iterate and experiment quickly, such as working through an ambiguous open-ended question and turning into a tractable experiment, choosing baselines, and investigating unexpected details, as well as deciding what comes next.

• You have a strong background in ML, CS, or an adjacent quantitative field, developed through a combination of engineering and research.

Nice to have

• You might be coming from a frontier lab, a third-party evaluation organisation, or an ML team at a technology company in e.g., science of evals, security research, forecasting, or interpretability.

• You're familiar with the model training pipeline, and have trained, fine-tuned, probed models, or built infrastructure that makes experimentation scalable.

• Published work that people in the field actually engaged with: a first-author paper, a benchmark others adopted, shifted how a community thought about something, was built into a product, or changing how real systems get deployed

• Range across the philosopher-to-engineer spectrum - comfortable arguing about where capability is heading in three years, and comfortable writing the code that tests whether you're right.

Our Values

We are in the business of building trust. We take our values seriously and treat them as commitments to each other, held to the same bar as the ones we make to customers.

Strong back: high standards, keep our promises, work hard.

Fast feet: experiment, cut scope, take delight in pace.

Eyes up: wrestle with the mission, and let where AI is heading shape our strategy, our teams and our day-to-day work.

Open heart: say the scary thing, create connection, make room for emotions.

Underwriting superintelligence is our life's work.

Compensation & Perks

• Competitive annual salary

• Equity (significant part of total compensation)

• Health, dental and vision insurance for you and your dependents

• Visa sponsorship and relocation stipend to bring you to SF, if needed

• Daily lunch, dinner & snacks