Research Scientist, Safety Post Training

About the role

Scale Labs is launching a new team focused on policy research to bridge the gap between AI research and global policymakers. This team collaborates broadly across industry, the public sector, and academia and regularly publishes findings.

Responsibilities

• Design and run post-training pipelines to study how training choices affect model safety, robustness, and alignment properties
• Develop interpretability-informed evaluations that reveal how and why models produce unsafe, deceptive, or otherwise undesirable behaviors, and use those insights to guide targeted mitigations
• Collaborate with policymakers, engineers, and other researchers to translate post-training and interpretability findings into actionable safety standards, evaluation benchmarks, and best practices

Requirements

• Commitment to promoting safe, secure, and trustworthy AI deployments
• Experience with post-training and RL techniques such as RLHF, DPO, GRPO, and similar approaches
• A track record of published research in machine learning, particularly in generative AI
• At least three years of experience addressing sophisticated ML problems, whether in a research setting or in product development
• Strong written and verbal communication skills to operate in a cross-functional team

Nice to have

• Experience with mechanistic interpretability, probing, or other techniques for understanding model internals
• Familiarity with red-teaming or adversarial evaluation of post-trained models
• Experience studying failure modes introduced or masked by post-training, such as reward hacking, sycophancy, or alignment faking

Benefits

Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.

Pay

$216,000 - $270,000 USD