Staff / Principal Research Engineer, AI Safety Mitigations

Lila Sciences • Cambridge, MA

10h • $224,000 - $336,000

About The Position

Lila Sciences is building a high-agency AI safety team to engage with science, model training, lab integration, and other core teams. The team will identify and mitigate risks from scientific superintelligence while preserving scientific discovery capabilities. Its initial work includes developing a safety strategy tailored to Lila’s goals and deployment approaches, technical safety strategy, ecosystem engagement, safety-focused evaluations, risk-mitigating systems, and research into longer-term needs such as oversight of superintelligent scientific systems.

This high-priority individual-contributor role will develop and test safeguards that reduce societal risks from increasingly capable closed-loop scientific AI. The engineer will apply experience building safety interventions for frontier models to scientific models, agents, tools, and laboratory-connected workflows. Working with domain scientists, risk researchers, evaluators, and engineering teams, the role translates risk findings and policy requirements into effective interventions, develops and tests approaches, and helps integrate reliable safeguards into relevant systems. Lila is open to candidates with different levels of seniority and varying depth across mitigation approaches.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience developing and validating safety interventions for frontier models within training, post-training, or large-scale inference systems, with contributions to model development or release cycles.
• Depth in at least one relevant area, such as safety post-training, model-level classifiers, safeguards integrated into inference, or abuse monitoring and enforcement across a model-serving platform.
• Experience working directly with model-development or safeguards teams, using access appropriate to the intervention—such as training pipelines, model internals, inference infrastructure, or systematic evaluation access—to investigate failures and implement improvements.
• Strong research-engineering skills and the ability to move from an ambiguous problem to working, maintainable implementations.
• Sound experimental judgment, including the ability to assess robustness, interpret imperfect metrics, and reason about competing objectives.
• Ability to collaborate across research and engineering teams, explain technical trade-offs, and take ownership of complex individual contributions.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with scientific models, scientific software, or laboratory-connected systems.
• Safety work involving tool-using agents, multi-step workflows, or high-consequence misuse.
• Experience connecting expert-generated evidence and policy requirements to training data, evaluation criteria, or operational controls.

Responsibilities

• Translate scientific risk assessments, dual-use policy boundaries, and evaluation findings into concrete mitigation designs and testable requirements.
• Develop and implement safeguards, potentially spanning model training, classifiers, monitoring, access controls, and runtime interventions.
• Build experiments to measure risk reduction, robustness, effects on legitimate scientific use, and practical performance constraints.
• Use adversarial findings and observed failures to improve safeguards in collaboration with automated-safety and scientific-evaluation researchers.
• Work with model-training, post-training, inference, and platform teams to integrate mitigations into model development, release evaluation, and large-scale serving systems, with appropriate instrumentation and reproducible testing.
• Investigate regressions, distribution shifts, and emerging misuse patterns, and use evidence to guide further development.

Benefits

• Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage for full-time U.S. employees.
• Employer-paid life and disability insurance for full-time U.S. employees.
• Flexible time off with generous company-wide holidays.
• Paid parental leave.
• Educational assistance program.
• Commuter benefits, including bike share memberships for office-based employees.
• Company-subsidized lunch program.
• Regionally tailored comprehensive benefits for full-time employees outside the U.S.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed