Center for AI Safety
Senior Research Engineer
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The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. We address AI’s toughest challenges through technical research, field-building initiatives, and policy engagement, along with our sister organization, Center for AI Safety Action Fund.
As a Senior Research Engineer here, you’ll work at the intersection of cutting-edge ML research and reliable engineering. You’ll take full ownership of research projects, from premise to publication, and be expected to drive them relatively autonomously with input from an advisor. You’ll design and run experiments on large language models, build the tooling needed to train and evaluate models at scale, and turn results into publishable research. You’ll collaborate closely with CAIS researchers and external academic and commercial partners, using our compute cluster to run large-scale training and evaluation. The work spans areas like AI honesty, robustness, transparency, and trojan/backdoor behaviors, aimed at reducing real-world risks from advanced AI systems.
Key Responsibilities Include:
- Own end-to-end research experiments, from premise to publication.
- Train and fine-tune large transformer models across domains.
- Own the design and maintenance of 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 helping drive shared research direction and responding quickly in research cycles.
- Take ownership of research infrastructure as needed, such as internal tooling, documentation, and reproducibility practices for the team.
You might be a good fit if you:
- 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 co-authored at least one paper published at a top ML conference venue (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.
- 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.
- Alternatively, have made meaningful research contributions at a leading AI lab.
- 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 with teammates.
- Take ownership of your individual part in a project.
Know someone who could be a great fit for this role? Submit their details through our Referral Form. 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.
If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact [email protected].
We value diversity and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.
Center for AI Safety San Francisco, California, USA Office
San Francisco, CA, United States
What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene
San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area attracts more startup funding than any other region in the world. Home to Stanford University and UC Berkeley, leading VC firms and several of the world’s most valuable companies, the Bay Area is the place to go for anyone looking to make it big in the tech industry. That said, San Francisco has a lot to offer beyond technology thanks to a thriving art and music scene, excellent food and a short drive to several of the country’s most beautiful recreational areas.
Key Facts About San Francisco Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
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- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
- Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
- Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
