AI Ethics and Safety Policy Researcher

DeepMind•Mountain View, CA

About The Position

We are looking for an AI Ethics and Safety Policy Researcher to join our Responsible Development & Innovation (ReDI) team at Google DeepMind (GDM). In this role, you will be responsible for proactively identifying, researching, and addressing emerging AI ethics and safety challenges. Such risks relate to new AI capabilities and modalities, including but not limited to persuasion, social intelligence, personalisation, agentics, and robotics. You will conduct novel research and partner with internal and external experts to develop, adapt and implement practical guidelines and policies which mitigate against emerging risks. These guidelines and policies will ensure that GDM develops and deploys its technology in a way that is aligned with the company's AI Principles. Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority. As an AI Ethics and Safety Policy Researcher, your focus will be identifying, deeply understanding and mitigating emerging AI risks. You should expect your outputs to take various forms, depending on the topic or need. This may include: original research papers or other publications on emerging AI ethics and safety issues, ideal model behaviour policies that inform model development and steer evaluations, guidelines for research or governance teams to follow when developing or deploying technology; and artifacts, processes, or coordination mechanisms needed to best support the creation and implementation of those guidelines and policies at GDM and beyond.

Requirements

A PhD, or equivalent experience, in a relevant field, such as AI ethics or safety, computer science, social sciences, or public policy
Proven expertise in AI ethics, AI policy or a related field
Demonstrable track record of implementing policies
Strong research and writing skills, evidenced by publications in top journal and conference proceedings
Experience working within interdisciplinary teams
Ability to communicate complex concepts and ideas simply for a range of collaborators
Ability to think critically and creatively about complex ethical issues

Responsibilities

Systematically identify risks associated with emerging and proliferating AI capabilities
Conduct original research on identified challenges, gathering information from a variety of sources, including external and internal experts, academic literature, and industry reports
Design and build operational frameworks for mitigating model risks, converting them into standardized artefacts such as universal training datasets and evaluation protocols
Collaborate with model development teams to help them adopt and apply these frameworks, guiding them in defining project-specific metrics and criteria for significant results
Communicate findings and recommendations to stakeholders, including researchers, engineers, product managers, and executives
Support the teams across GDM in interpreting the frameworks and ensuring that training and evaluation data as appropriate.
Work closely with relevant across the organisation to align and update the frameworks to ensure their continued relevance in a rapidly changing environment