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

ByteDance; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 254,000 - 480,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

401(k) with company match

Paid parental leave

Job summary

ByteDance is seeking a Research Scientist Graduate (Seed Model-Alignment & Preparedness) for a 2027 start in San Jose. You will contribute to safety-aligned model development, RL-based safety training, and risk assessment across high-stakes domains.

Strong ML foundations and hands-on experience with LLMs, RL, and Python/PyTorch are essential. Responsibilities include automated red teaming, monitoring, and scalable deployment, collaborating with cross-disciplinary teams, and publishing results to

Qualifications

• PhD or near completion in CS/EE/EC Eng/Physics/Math or related field.
• Strong foundations in ML, DL, statistics with experience in LLMs/RL or related.
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch with ability to implement algorithms and build experiments.
• Hands-on experience in agent RL, model training, dataset development, or ML infrastructure.
• Ability to translate open-ended model questions into testable hypotheses, run experiments, and report results.

Responsibilities

• Agent RL & safety training: design environments, rewards, and data to minimize deception and ensure safe autonomy.
• Frontier risk assessment with domain experts to evaluate dangerous capabilities and safeguards.
• Automated red teaming: build attack generation and adversarial training to harden models.
• Monitoring & oversight: develop oversight models, permission controls, and evaluate effectiveness.
• Failure analysis & deployment: transform real-world failures into reproducible experiments and scale improvements.

Skills

ML Foundations

RL

LLMs

PyTorch

Python

Experiment pipelines

AI safety

Safety in AI

Education

PhD in CS/EE/EC Eng/Physics/Math

Tools

Python

PyTorch

Job description

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

Location:

San Jose

Team:

Technology

Employment Type:

Regular

Job Code:

A59867

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Responsibilities

• 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

• Individuals who are completing or have recently completed a PhD 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.
• Experience with agent RL, including environment design, reward design for multi-step tasks, and long-horizon or multi-agent training.
• 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 $254400 - $480000 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.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates:

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;

2. Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and

3. Exercising sound judgment.

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