Research Engineer – Mechanistic Interpretability Systems

Acceler8 Talent; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Acceler8 Talent in San Francisco seeks a Research Engineer to build experimental systems for interpretability, alignment, and RL research, focusing on understanding model internals rather than production ML.

You will prototype tooling, run fast experiments, and contribute to new benchmarks for model robustness. PhD welcome but not required; strong software skills and curiosity about interpretability are essential.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience with experimental ML / research systems.
• Comfort working close to model internals.
• Interest in interpretability, alignment, RL, or mechanistic understanding.

Responsibilities

• Build experimental tooling and systems to support interpretability research.
• Create custom RL-style environments for alignment research and testing.
• Probe internal representations and detect latent concepts such as deception, goals, uncertainty, or hidden objectives.
• Develop benchmarks for model consistency and robustness and evaluate experimental ideas.
• Operate in a fast, greenfield research context with rapid iteration.

Skills

Software engineering

Experimental ML

Model internals

Interpretability

PhD helpful

Job description

Acceler8 Talent in San Francisco seeks a Research Engineer to build experimental systems for interpretability, alignment, and RL research, focusing on understanding model internals rather than production ML.

You will prototype tooling, run fast experiments, and contribute to new benchmarks for model robustness. PhD welcome but not required; strong software skills and curiosity about interpretability are essential.