Research Scientist, Multimodal Alignment, Safety, and Fairness

About the role

We are seeking strong Research Scientists with expertise in AI research and experience in interdisciplinary sociotechnical modeling to join a multimodal safety research effort within Google DeepMind's Frontier AI unit. This role requires a passion for understanding and modeling the interactions between AI and society, a strong awareness of the AI alignment and safety landscape, and a penchant for developing novel ideas, methods, interfaces, and tools.

About us

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 and ultimately achieve Artificial General 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.

The role

• Research: Generate new ideas, keep up with the state of the art in the field, discuss research directions with other researchers.
• Execute: Design, rapidly implement, and rigorously evaluate cutting-edge ideas, methods, interfaces, and tools to explore new sociotechnical AI systems.
• Communicate: Report and present research findings and developments clearly and efficiently both internally and externally, verbally and in writing.
• Collaborate: Suggest and engage in inter- and intra-team collaborations to meet ambitious research goals, while also driving significant individual contributions.
• Drive technical projects: Take ownership of substantial technical projects, from ideation and design to implementation and evaluation, often involving cross-functional collaboration.

Key responsibilities

• Research: Generate new ideas, keep up with the state of the art in the field, discuss research directions with other researchers.
• Execute: Design, rapidly implement, and rigorously evaluate cutting-edge ideas, methods, interfaces, and tools to explore new sociotechnical AI systems.
• Communicate: Report and present research findings and developments clearly and efficiently both internally and externally, verbally and in writing.
• Collaborate: Suggest and engage in inter- and intra-team collaborations to meet ambitious research goals, while also driving significant individual contributions.
• Drive technical projects: Take ownership of substantial technical projects, from ideation and design to implementation and evaluation, often involving cross-functional collaboration.

About you

• Requirements:
• PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
• Strong publication record in top machine learning conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML, ICLR, ICCV, ECCV).
• Demonstrated hands-on experience in developing multimodal AI models and systems.
• Strong programming skills in Python and experience with at least one major deep learning framework (e.g., JAX/Flax/Gemax).
• Experience conducting independent research and development, including experimental design, implementation, and analysis.
• In addition, the following would be an advantage:
• Proven expertise in working with and tuning large-scale vision language models.
• Experience prototyping with VLMs with modern prompting strategies.
• Experience finetuning and post-training LLMs using RL.
• Experience with developing agentic AI solutions to complex problems.
• Excited to collaborate across orgs and disciplines to leverage diverse perspectives and expertise and find creative solutions.
• Interest and a strong awareness of the AI alignment / safety / responsibility / fairness landscape.
• Experience with Generative AI techniques and architectures.
• Familiarity with Reinforcement Learning or alignment methods.
• Experience with multimodal learning, integrating information from different data types (e.g., vision, audio, text).

Pay

The US base salary range for this full-time position is between 147,000 USD - 211,000 USD + bonus + equity + benefits.