Research Engineer / Scientist, Model Welfare

As a Research Engineer/Scientist within the newly formed Model Welfare program, you will be among the first to work to better understand, evaluate, and address concerns about the potential welfare and moral status of AI systems. You are curious about the intersection of machine learning, ethics, and safety and are adept at navigating technical and philosophical uncertainty. You’ll run technical research projects to investigate model characteristics of plausible relevance to welfare, consciousness, or related properties and will design and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate the risk of welfare harms. Your work will often involve collaboration with other teams, including Interpretability, Finetuning, Alignment Science, and Safeguards. 

Our announcement of the model welfare program, and our welfare assessment of Claude Opus 4 (published in the System Card) give a sense of some of our early work.

Note: We expect this role to be based in the San Francisco office.

Possible projects

• Investigate and improve the reliability of introspective self-reports from models
• Collaborate with Interpretability to explore potentially welfare-relevant features and circuits
• Improve and expand our welfare assessments for future frontier models
• Evaluate the presence of potentially welfare-relevant capabilities and characteristics as a function of model scale
• Develop strategies for making high-trust/verifiable commitments to models
• Explore possible interventions and deploy them into production (e.g. allowing models to end harmful or distressing interactions)

• Have significant applied software, ML, or research engineering experience
• Have experience contributing to empirical AI research projects and/or technical AI safety research
• Can reliably turn abstract theories into creative, tractable research hypotheses and experiments
• Prefer to move fast and iterate rather than run long extensive projects
• Are excited to dive into new technical areas on a regular basis
• Care about the possible impacts of AI development on humans and the AI systems themselves

• Have authored research papers in machine learning, NLP, AI safety, interpretability, and/or LLM psychology and behavior
• Be familiar with moral philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, or related fields (however, such experience will not substitute for technical research engineering skills)
• Be effective science communicators with a track record of public communication
• Have strong project management skills

• 100% of the skills needed to perform the job
• Formal certifications or education credentials (please ignore the education requirements below the Logistics heading)