Senior Research Scientist

Center for AI Safety • San Francisco, CA

18h • $200,000 - $250,000

About The Position

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 Scientist here, you will lead and execute high-impact research that advances the safety and reliability of frontier AI systems, taking ownership of ambitious open problems and seeing them through to publication. We expect senior scientists to set a high bar for research quality and push the team’s thinking forward. 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.

Requirements

• Have a Ph.D. in computer science, machine learning, or a related field with 5+ years of related research experience.
• Are familiar with relevant frameworks and libraries (e.g., PyTorch and Hugging Face).
• Have extensive experience launching and training distributed ML jobs.
• Communicate clearly and promptly with teammates.
• Have an extremely strong publication record, with many first-authored work at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, etc.).

Responsibilities

• Pursue high-value research directions with limited guidance.
• Own end-to-end research experiments with full accountability for quality and outcomes.
• Train and fine-tune large transformer models across domains.
• Build and maintain datasets and benchmarks.
• Run distributed training and evaluation at scale.
• Lead the writing and publication process on key papers, including driving submissions to top conferences.
• Collaborate with researchers and external partners while contributing to shared research direction, responding quickly in research cycles, and elevating the quality of the team’s work.

Benefits

• Health insurance for you and your dependents
• 401K plan + 4% matching
• Unlimited PTO
• Lunch and dinner at the office
• Annual Professional Development Stipend
• Access to some of the top talent working on technical and conceptual research in AI safety

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree