Research Engineer

Research Engineer, AI Safety / Alignment San Francisco | Hybrid, 3 days in office$200K-$300K base + equity We’re building a new applied AI research team focused on AI alignment and existential risk, studying how increasingly capable models and agents behave when given opportunities to exploit, cheat or optimise for the wrong objective. What you’ll do You’ll design and build evaluation and RL-style environments that test frontier models for behaviours such as reward hacking and exploiting weaknesses in tasks or graders. You’ll own research projects end to end: developing scenarios, building environments, directing agents, iterating graders, analysing model behaviour and refining the experiment. You’ll also contribute to the shared infrastructure used to create, run and evaluate these environments. Prior experience with RL environments, agent evaluations or reinforcement learning is valuable, but not required. A good fit:Strong generalist software engineering ability, ideally Python 1+ years of professional software engineering experience Genuine interest in AI alignment and reducing existential risk from advanced AIStrong analytical and conceptual reasoning Able to pick up unfamiliar technical domains quickly Comfortable owning ambiguous technical projects end to end Interested in working directly with frontier LLMs and AI agents Experience with evals, agents, RL environments, security or adversarial systems is a plus