Research Engineer, Frontier Safety Risk Assessment

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. 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.

Our team identifies, assesses, and mitigates potential catastrophic risks from current and future AI systems. As a member of technical staff, you will design, implement, and empirically validate approaches to assessing and managing catastrophic risk from current and future frontier AI systems. At the moment, these risks range from loss of control of advanced AI systems or automated ML R&D through misuse of AI for widespread CBRN or cyber harm.

We are seeking 2 Research Engineers for the Frontier Safety Risk Assessment team within the AGI Safety and Alignment Team. 

In this role, you will contribute novel research towards our ability to measure and assess risk from frontier models. This might include:

• Identifying new risk pathways within current areas (loss of control, ML R&D, cyber, CBRN, harmful manipulation) or in new ones;
• Conceiving of, designing, and developing new ways to measure pre-mitigation and post-mitigation risk.
• Forecasting and scenario planning for future risks which are not yet material.

Your work will involve complex conceptual thinking as well as engineering. You should be comfortable with research that is uncertain, under-constrained, and which does not have an achievable “right answer”. You should also be skilled at engineering, especially using Python, and able to rapidly familiarise yourself with internal and external codebases. Lastly, you should be able to adapt to pragmatic constraints around compute and researcher time that require us to prioritise effort based on the value of information.

Although this job description is written for a Research Engineer, all members of this team are better thought of as members of technical staff. We expect everyone to contribute to the research as well as the engineering and to be strong in both areas.

The role will mostly depend on your general ability to assess and manage future risks, rather than from specialist knowledge within the risk domains, but insofar as specialist knowledge is helpful, knowledge in ML R&D and loss of control as risk domains are likely the most valuable.