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Senior Research Engineer
Job Location:
Job Location:
San Francisco, CA - USA
Monthly Salary:
Not provided by the employer
Monthly Salary:
Posted:
1 April 2026 (30+ days ago)
Posted:
Application Deadline:
16 September 2026
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Vacancies:
Job Summary
The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. We address AIs 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 Engineer here youll work at the intersection of cutting-edge ML research and reliable engineering. Youll take full ownership of research projects from premise to publication and be expected to drive them relatively autonomously with input from an advisor. Youll 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. Youll 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.
Key Responsibilities Include:
- Own end-to-end research experiments from premise to publication.
- Train and fine-tune large transformer models across domains.
- Own the design and maintenance of datasets and benchmarks.
- Run distributed training and evaluation at scale.
- Write and ship research collaborating with co-authors and supporting submissions of papers to top conferences.
- Collaborate with researchers and external partners while helping drive shared research direction and responding quickly in research cycles.
- Take ownership of research infrastructure as needed such as internal tooling documentation and reproducibility practices for the team.
You might be a good fit if you:
- Are a current PhD student or researcher in machine learning or a related field. Exceptional candidates with a strong publication record may be considered regardless of degree level.
- Have co-authored at least one paper published at a top ML conference venue (e.g. NeurIPS ICML ICLR ACL CVPR). Workshop papers are considered though peer-reviewed conference publications are strongly preferred. Publications in journals such as IEEE or Springer Nature are typically given less weight.
- Have a track record of empirical research in AI or ML particularly in AI safety-relevant areas (e.g. adversarial robustness calibration benchmarking). We weight empirical research heavily; candidates with primarily theoretical backgrounds are generally not a strong fit.
- Alternatively have made meaningful research contributions at a leading AI lab.
- Are able to read an ML paper understand the key result and understand how it fits into the broader literature.
- Are comfortable setting up launching and debugging ML experiments.
- Are familiar with relevant frameworks and libraries (e.g. PyTorch).
- Communicate clearly and promptly with teammates.
- Take ownership of your individual part in a project.
$170000 - $230000 a year
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
Know someone who could be a great fit for this role Submit their details through our Referral Form. If we end up hiring your referral youll receive a $1500 bonus once theyve been with CAIS for 90 days.
The Center for AI Safety is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity or expression national origin ancestry age disability medical condition marital status military or veteran status or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal state and local alignment with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.
If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process please contact emailprotected.
We value diversity and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.
Required Experience:
Senior IC
Key Skills
- Arm
- Machine Learning
- Raspberry Pi
- Python
- C/C++
- Image Processing
- 5G
- OS Kernels
- Research Experience
- Firewall
- Research & Development
- Computer Vision
About Company
Center for AI Safety. Reducing societal-scale risks from AI by advancing safety research, building the field of AI safety researchers, and promoting safety standards.
