Research Scientist - AI Safety & Scalable ML

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance for you and dependets

401K plan + 4% matching

Unlimited PTO

Lunch and dinner at the office

Annual Professional Development Stiped

Job summary

The Center for AI Safety is seeking a Research Engineer or Research Scientist to lead and execute high‑impact empirical research on frontier AI systems, with emphasis on safety and reliability. You will design experiments, train models at scale, and collaborate with researchers and external partners to publish results.

You will work with large language models and multimodal models, focus on practical problems, and have freedom to pursue novel directions that advance our understanding of AI

Qualifications

• Have co-authored multiple papers published at top ML conference venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, CVPR).
• 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/ML, particularly in AI safety‑relevant areas (e.g. adversarial robustness, calibration, benchmarking).
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Own research experiments end-to‑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.

Skills

PyTorch

Empirical research

Machine learning

Communication

Education

PhD student or researcher in ML/AI

Tools

Compute cluster

Job description

The Center for AI Safety is seeking a Research Engineer or Research Scientist to lead and execute high‑impact empirical research on frontier AI systems, with emphasis on safety and reliability. You will design experiments, train models at scale, and collaborate with researchers and external partners to publish results.

You will work with large language models and multimodal models, focus on practical problems, and have freedom to pursue novel directions that advance our understanding of AI