Senior AI Safety Engineer: Scientific Mitigations

Lila Sciences, Inc.; Cambridge, San Francisco (MA, CA); On-site; USD 224,000 - 336,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus potential

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Lila Sciences is seeking a Staff / Principal Research Engineer to lead AI safety mitigations for frontier models in Cambridge, MA (and London, SF). You will build and test safeguards, collaborate with scientists and engineers to deploy mitigations across model development, training and serving systems.

We offer competitive compensation with bonus potential and generous equity, plus comprehensive U.S. benefits. Base salary range is $224,000 - $336,000 USD and USD-based roles apply in the U.S.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience developing and validating safety interventions for frontier models within training, post-training or large-scale inference systems.
• Depth in at least one area such as safety post-training, model-level classifiers, safeguards integrated into inference, or abuse monitoring and enforcement across a model-serving platform.
• Experience working directly with model-development or safeguards teams using access to training pipelines, model internals, inference infrastructure or systematic evaluation access to investigate failures and implement improvements.
• Strong research-engineering skills and the ability to move from an ambiguous problem to working, maintainable implementations.
• Sound experimental judgment, including an ability to assess robustness, interpret imperfect metrics and reason about competing objectives.
• The ability to collaborate across research and engineering teams, explain technical trade-offs and take ownership of complex individual contributions.

Responsibilities

• Translate scientific risk assessments into concrete mitigation designs and testable requirements.
• Develop and implement safeguards suited to the problem, potentially spanning model training, classifiers, monitoring, access controls and runtime interventions.
• Build experiments that measure risk reduction, robustness and effects on legitimate scientific use.
• Use adversarial findings and observed failures to improve safeguards, working closely with automated-safety and scientific evaluation researchers.
• Work directly with model-training, post-training, inference and platform teams to integrate mitigations into model development, release evaluation and large-scale serving systems, with appropriate instrumentation and reproducible testing.
• Investigate regressions, distribution shifts and emerging misuse patterns, and use the evidence to guide further development.

Skills

Safety interventions

Frontier models experience

Model development

Inference safeguards

Experimentation and evaluation

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Lila Sciences is seeking a Staff / Principal Research Engineer to lead AI safety mitigations for frontier models in Cambridge, MA (and London, SF). You will build and test safeguards, collaborate with scientists and engineers to deploy mitigations across model development, training and serving systems.

We offer competitive compensation with bonus potential and generous equity, plus comprehensive U.S. benefits. Base salary range is $224,000 - $336,000 USD and USD-based roles apply in the U.S.