Research Engineer (AI Safety & Alignment)

• Joining us as a Research Engineer, you’ll be at the forefront of tackling one of the most critical challenges in AI today: safety and alignment
• Your work will be pivotal in understanding and mitigating the risks of advanced AI, conducting foundational research to make our models safer, and solving the core technical problems of AI alignment—ensuring our models behave in accordance with human values and intentions
• The Safety team is dedicated to pioneering and implementing techniques that make our models more robust, honest, and harmless
• As a Research Engineer, you will bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical application, writing high-quality code to test hypotheses and integrating successful safety solutions directly into our products
• Your research will not only protect millions of users but also contribute to the broader scientific community’s understanding of how to build safe, beneficial AI
• Develop and implement novel evaluation methodologies and metrics to assess the safety and alignment of large language models
• Research and develop cutting-edge techniques for model alignment, value learning, and interpretability
• Conduct adversarial testing to proactively uncover potential vulnerabilities and failure modes in our models
• Analyze and mitigate biases, toxicity, and other harmful behaviors in large language models through techniques like reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and fine-tuning
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to translate safety research into practical, scalable solutions and best practices
• Stay abreast of the latest advancements in AI safety research and contribute to the academic community through publications and presentations

Benefits

• 💰 We invest in your future with a generous 401(K) contribution
• Top-notch health coverage for you & your family, with majority of the premium covered
• 🍼 New parents, we’ve got you covered with incredible paid leave -up to 20 weeks
• 🌴 4 weeks of PTO to explore, unwind & come back recharged
• 🍽️ Daily in-office catering plus a monthly Doordash stipend to help keep you fueled no matter where you are
• ✨ Monthly wellness stipend to support you in your health journey

• Experience working with GPUs (training, serving, debugging)
• Are passionate about the responsible development of AI and dedicated to solving complex safety challenges
• Write clear and clean production-facing and training code
• Strong understanding of modern machine learning techniques, particularly transformers and reinforcement learning, with a focus on their safety implications
• Hold a PhD (or equivalent experience) in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related discipline
• Experience with data pipelines and data infrastructure
• Publications in relevant academic journals or conferences in the field of machine learning
• Have research in AI safety, alignment, ethics, or a related area
• Knowledge of the broader societal and ethical implications of AI, including policy and governance
• Experience with explainable AI (XAI) and interpretability techniques
• Familiarity with ML deployment and orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker, cloud)
• Experience training large models in a distributed setting
• Experience with product experimentation and A/B testing