Research Scientist (Seed Model-Alignment&Preparedness) - 2026 Start (PhD)

ByteDance; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 218,000 - 388,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with company match

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Parental leave

Disability coverage

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Paid sick days

Paid Personal Time

Job summary

ByteDance in San Jose is seeking a Research Scientist Graduate (Seed Model‑Alignment & Preparedness) for a 2027 start. You will join the Technology team as a regular, full‑time hire to push forward alignment, safety evaluation, and preparedness for frontier models and agent-enabled systems.

As a new graduate, you will tackle frontier challenges, design agent RL experiments, and contribute to automated red‑teaming, monitoring, and failure analysis.

Qualifications

• Minimum qualifications include BS in CS/EE/Math/Physics or related discipline; strong ML foundations and RL exposure.
• Preferred qualifications include MS in CS/EE/Math/Physics or related discipline; experience with SFT/RLHF and research in AI safety or scalable oversight.

Responsibilities

• Agent RL & safety training: design environments, rewards, data to reduce deception and unauthorized actions; ensure generalization to new tasks.
• Frontier risk assessment: evaluate dangerous capabilities, model threats, build safeguards with empirical evidence.
• Automated red teaming: develop automated attack generation and adversarial training to harden models.
• Monitoring & oversight: build oversight models, check permissions, measure effectiveness and evasion resistance.
• Failure analysis & deployment: convert failures into reproducible experiments and collaborate with teams to ship robust solutions at scale.

Skills

ML foundations

Python & PyTorch

Agent RL & safety

Experiment pipelines

Hypothesis testing & reporting

Education

BS in CS/EE/Math/Physics or related

MS in CS/EE/Math/Physics preferred

Job description

Research Scientist Graduate (Seed Model-Alignment&Preparedness) - 2027 Start

Location:

San Jose

Team:

Technology

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A36668

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Responsibilities

About the TeamSeed Model–Alignment & Preparedness is dedicated to advancing AI safety alongside frontier model capabilities. Backed by sustained investment and substantial compute resources, we tackle fundamental challenges in alignment, safety evaluation, and preparedness for emerging risks—translating research into safe, reliable AI systems that benefit people.We’re looking for researchers to make frontier models and agents safer, with a strong focus on agent RL: training agents that stay safe and controllable in tool use, code execution, and long-horizon tasks.We are looking for talented individuals to join our team. As a graduate, you will get opportunities to pursue bold ideas, tackle complex challenges, and unlock limitless growth.Successful candidates must be able to commit to an onboarding date by the end of the year. Please state your availability and graduation date clearly in your resume.Candidates can apply to a maximum of two positions and will be considered for jobs in the order you apply. The application limit is applicable to our Company and its affiliates' jobs globally. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis - we encourage you to apply early.

• Agent RL & safety training: Use RL, SFT, and preference optimization to train agents safely. Design environments, rewards, and training data that reduce deception, reward hacking, and unauthorized actions, and teach agents to check authorization, recognize risks, and stop when needed, without sacrificing useful autonomy. Ensure safety generalizes to new tasks and holds up through further training.
• Frontier risk assessment: Partner with domain experts to evaluate dangerous capabilities (e.g., CBRN, cybersecurity), model threats, and build safeguards. Provide empirical evidence to guide development and deployment decisions.
• Automated red teaming: Build automated attack generation and adversarial training methods to harden models against jailbreaks, prompt injection, and other adversarial inputs.
• Monitoring & oversight: Detect risks from inputs and outputs, execution traces, chains of thought, and internal representations. Build oversight models, action review, and permission controls, and measure their effectiveness, evasion resistance, and cost.
• Failure analysis & deployment: Turn real-world failures into reproducible experiments and pinpoint root causes through controlled studies and ablations. Work with pre-training, post-training, infra, and product teams to ship what works at scale.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a BS degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a related discipline.
• Strong foundations in ML, deep learning, and statistics, with research or engineering experience in LLMs, RL, or related fields.
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch (or similar), with the ability to independently implement algorithms, build experiment pipelines, and debug data, training, and evaluation issues.
• Deep hands-on experience in at least one of the following: agent RL, model training, dataset development, agent systems, evaluation, or ML infrastructure.
• Ability to turn open-ended questions about model behavior into testable hypotheses, run experiments, and clearly communicate results and limitations to research, engineering, and domain partners.
• A genuine commitment to advancing safety alongside capabilities, and comfort with ambiguous, unsolved problems.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a MS degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a related discipline.
• Experience with SFT, RLHF/RLAIF/RLVR, distributed training, or automated red teaming.
• Research experience in AI control, scalable oversight, CoT monitoring, mechanistic interpretability, or prompt injection defense.
• Experience evaluating or mitigating risks in high-stakes domains such as CBRN or cybersecurity.
• Strong publications, open-source contributions, or a track record of applying research to real-world systems.

Job Information

The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $218400 - $387600 annually.

Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.

Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).

The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.

About Us

Founded in 2012, ByteDance's mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. With a suite of more than a dozen products, including TikTok, Lemon8, CapCut and Pico as well as platforms specific to the China market, including Toutiao, Douyin, and Xigua, ByteDance has made it easier and more fun for people to connect with, consume, and create content.

Why Join ByteDance

Inspiring creativity is at the core of ByteDance's mission. Our innovative products are built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and enrich life - a mission we work towards every day.

As ByteDancers, we strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our Company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.

Diversity & Inclusion

ByteDance is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At ByteDance, our mission is to inspire creativity and enrich life. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.

Reasonable Accommodation

ByteDance is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request.