Research Scientist

The Center for AI Safety is a research and field-building nonprofit located in San Francisco. Our mission is to reduce catastrophic and existential risks from artificial intelligence through field-building and technical research. 

As a Research Scientist, you will pursue a variety of research projects in fields such as Power Aversion, Trojans, Machine Ethics, and Reward Hacking. You will set the research directions and strategies to make our AI systems safer, more aligned and more robust. You will assist in writing and submitting articles for publication at top conferences. You will collaborate with both internal research staff (e.g., Dan Hendrycks) as well as academics at top universities (including Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, or MIT). You will leverage our compute cluster to run experiments at scale on large language models.

Representative Projects

• Finetuning large-scale transformers and evaluating them under different data domains.
• Creating and designing new datasets to evaluate the robustness of different models.
• Scaling machine learning systems to thousands of GPUs.
• Evaluating models in sequential decision-making games.
• Developing and launching ML competitions (e.g., Trojan Detection Challenge).
• Collaborating with academics on research ranging from transparency, proxy gaming, honest AI, interpretable uncertainty, and so on.

You might be a good fit if you:

• Ph.D. in computer science, machine learning, or a related field, with 5+ years of related research experience.
• Familiar with relevant frameworks and libraries (e.g., pytorch and huggingface).
• Have experience launching and training distributed ML jobs.
• Communicate clearly and promptly with teammates.
• Have co-authored an NLP or RL paper in a top conference.

$140,000 - $180,000 a year

The Center for AI Safety is a non-profit dedicated to ensuring the safety of future artificial intelligence systems. We believe that artificial intelligence will be a powerful technology which will dramatically change society and that AI safety must therefore be pursued proactively. To this end, we conduct research into machine learning safety and facilitate field-building projects which accelerate the growth of the safety community. Join us in steering the future of AI.

For this role we are considering Research Scientists with salary pay ranges of 140-180K.

Benefits:

1. Health insurance for you and your dependents

2. 401(k) plan with 4% matching

3. Unlimited PTO

4. Free lunch and dinner at the office

5. Commuter Benefit program

6. Annual learning & development stipend

If you have any questions about the role, feel free to reach out to hiring@safe.ai.

The Center of AI Safety is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Some studies have found that a higher percentage of women and underrepresented minority candidates won't apply if they don't meet every listed qualification. The Center for AI Safety values candidates of all backgrounds. If you find yourself excited by the position but you don't check every box in the description, we encourage you to apply anyway!