Research Engineer/Scientist

Center for AI Safety; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance for you and dependets

401K with 4% matching

Unlimited PTO

Lunch and dinner at the office

Annual Professional Development Stip</

Access to top AI safety researchers

Job summary

Center for AI Safety in San Francisco seeks researchers to advance the safety and reliability of frontier AI systems. You will design and run large-scale experiments, train transformers and multimodal models, and turn results into publishable work.

The role emphasizes empirical ML with substantial freedom to pursue high-impact questions, collaboration with academia and industry, and contributions to shared research directions.

Qualifications

• Strong track record of empirical ML research, ideally in AI safety or robustness.
• Ability to read papers and place results in the broader literature.
• Experience designing and debugging large-scale ML experiments.

Responsibilities

• Own research experiments end-to-end, from idea to publication.
• Train and evaluate large transformer models and multimodal systems at scale.
• Build, curate, and maintain datasets and benchmarks for evaluation.
• Collaborate with internal researchers and external partners on shared goals.
• Mentor teammates and improve research infrastructure and reproducibility.

Skills

Empirical ML

Deep learning

PyTorch

Experiment design

Communication

Education

PhD student or researcher in ML

Tools

Compute clusters

Benchmarking frameworks

Job description

The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. We address the toughest challenges in AI safety through technical research, field‑building initiatives, and policy engagement, along with our sister organization, Center for AI Safety Action Fund.

What distinguishes us is what we choose to work on. Our work is aimed at reducing real‑world risks from advanced AI systems. We deliberately pursue research directions that the field is not yet paying attention to, and we move on once the rest of the field catches up. Our focus is on problems that are both highly important and highly neglected, and our track record is built on getting to them first.

• In 2022-2023, we focused on AI honesty, robustness, transparency, and trojan/backdoor behaviors.
• In 2023-2024, we turned to malicious use and weaponization capabilities, introducing the first state‑of‑the‑art benchmarks for measuring it.
• More recently, we've been working on AI value systems and the functional well‑being of AI systems.

This is a research philosophy as opposed to a fixed agenda: we go where the important, unworked problems are. Because our work tends to be timely and to open up territory rather than crowd into it, our papers have repeatedly gone on to become widely cited and to set the standard for underexplored research areas. Our work is regularly used by AI safety institutes and frontier AI labs, and they have shaped real policy outcomes, including being presented directly to senators and policymakers.

About the role

As a Research Engineer (RE) or Research Scientist (RS) at CAIS, you'll lead and execute high‑impact research that advances the safety and reliability of frontier AI systems. This is the general posting for both roles; if you're interested in either, and we'll determine which is the better fit based on our judgment during the process.

You will design and run experiments on large language models, build the tooling to train and evaluate models at scale, and turn results into publishable research. You'll work closely with CAIS researchers and external academic and commercial partners, using our compute cluster to run large‑scale training and evaluation.

Our work centers on empirical deep learning research with large language models and/or multimodal models. If your background is primarily theoretical, this role may not be a good fit.

Research directions at CAIS are set by our Research Director, who selects and prioritizes projects for their importance, neglectedness, and timeliness, a major reason our work has been so impactful. In practice, this means that you will consistently be working on interesting, high‑impact problems, with substantial freedom in how you pursue them: designing and running experiments, iterating, and chasing the threads you find most promising.

Day to day work:

• Own research experiments end‑to‑end.
• Train and fine‑tune large transformer models across domains.
• Build and maintain datasets and benchmarks.
• Run distributed training and evaluation at scale.
• Write and ship research, collaborating with co‑authors, and supporting submissions of papers to top conferences.
• Collaborate with researchers and external partners while contributing to shared research direction and responding quickly in research cycles.
• Support research infrastructure as needed, such as internal tooling, documentation, and reproducibility practices for the team.
• Mentor, guide, and support others on the team.

You might be a good fit if you:

• Have co‑authored multiple papers published at a top ML conference venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, CVPR). Workshop papers are considered, though peer‑reviewed conference publications are strongly preferred. Publications in journals such as IEEE or Springer Nature are typically given less weight. Alternatively, have made meaningful research contributions at a leading AI lab.
• Are a current PhD student or researcher in machine learning or a related field. Exceptional candidates with a strong publication record may be considered regardless of degree level.
• Have a track record of empirical research in AI or ML, particularly in AI safety‑relevant areas (e.g., adversarial robustness, calibration, benchmarking). We weight empirical research heavily; candidates with primarily theoretical backgrounds are generally not a strong fit.
• Are able to read an ML paper, understand the key result, and understand how it fits into the broader literature.
• Are comfortable setting up, launching, and debugging ML experiments.
• Are familiar with relevant frameworks and libraries (e.g., PyTorch).
• Communicate clearly and promptly, and take ownership of your part of a project.

Compensation:

$140,000 - $200,000 a year

• Health insurance for you and your dependents
• 401K plan + 4% matching
• Unlimited PTO
• Lunch and dinner at the office
• Annual Professional Development Stipend
• Access to some of the top talent working on technical and conceptual research in AI safety

Know someone who could be a great fit for this role? If we end up hiring your referral, you'll receive a $1,500 bonus once they've been with CAIS for 90 days.

The Center for AI Safety is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, medical condition, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.

In alignment with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.

We value diversity and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.

If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact [e-mail].