Demo

Research Engineer

Center for AI Safety
San Francisco, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 3/31/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 5/31/2026

The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. We address AI’s toughest challenges through technical research, field-building initiatives, and policy engagement, along with our sister organization, Center for AI Safety Action Fund.

 

As a Research Engineer here, you'll work at the intersection of cutting-edge ML research and reliable engineering. You'll 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. You'll 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.

\n


Key Responsibilities Include:
  • Own end-to-end research experiments.
  • Train and fine-tune large transformer models across domains.
  • Build and maintain 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 contributing to shared research direction and responding quickly in research cycles.
  • Support research infrastructure as needed, such as internal tooling, documentation, and reproducibility practices for the team.


You might be a good fit if you:
  • Masters in ML or related position and at least 2 years of research experience.
  • Are able to read an ML paper, understand the key result, and understand how it fits into the broader literature.
  • Are familiar with relevant frameworks and libraries (e.g., pytorch and huggingface).
  • Have experience launching and training distributed ML jobs.
  • Communicate clearly and promptly with teammates.
  • Have co-authored an NLP or RL paper in a top conference.


\n
$140,000 - $200,000 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
\n

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, you’ll receive a $1,500 bonus once they’ve 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 laws. In 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 contact@safe.ai.​

 

We value diversity and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.

Salary : $140,000 - $200,000

If your compensation planning software is too rigid to deploy winning incentive strategies, it’s time to find an adaptable solution. Compensation Planning
Enhance your organization's compensation strategy with salary data sets that HR and team managers can use to pay your staff right. Surveys & Data Sets

Sign up to receive alerts about other jobs with skills like those required for the Research Engineer.

Click the checkbox next to the jobs that you are interested in.

  • Budget Administration Skill

    • Income Estimation: $131,676 - $196,560
    • Income Estimation: $141,524 - $211,236
  • Bug/Defect Analysis Skill

    • Income Estimation: $153,752 - $200,235
    • Income Estimation: $151,231 - $194,242
Employees: Get a Salary Increase
View Core, Job Family, and Industry Job Skills and Competency Data for more than 15,000 Job Titles Skills Library

Job openings at Center for AI Safety

  • Center for AI Safety San Francisco, CA
  • The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. We address AI’s toughes... more
  • 11 Days Ago

  • Center for AI Safety San Francisco, CA
  • The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. We address AI’s toughes... more
  • 16 Days Ago

  • Center for AI Safety San Francisco, CA
  • The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and advocacy organization focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. We address AI’s toughes... more
  • 16 Days Ago


Not the job you're looking for? Here are some other Research Engineer jobs in the San Francisco, CA area that may be a better fit.

  • Anthropic San Francisco, CA
  • About Anthropic Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and ... more
  • 13 Days Ago

  • Refresh San Francisco, CA
  • About The Role This is a high-ownership role for someone who wants to work at the frontier of LLM evaluation, agentic systems, and startup building. You wi... more
  • 9 Days Ago

AI Assistant is available now!

Feel free to start your new journey!