Research Engineer, Interpretability
Research Engineer focused on mechanistic interpretability, building tools and infrastructure to reverse-engineer neural networks for safer AI. Requires 5+ years software experience, Python proficiency, and AI research contributions.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Implement and analyze research experiments, both quickly in toy scenarios and at scale in large models
- Set up and optimize research workflows to run efficiently and reliably at large scale
- Build tools and abstractions to support rapid pace of research experimentation
- Develop and improve tools and infrastructure to support other teams in using Interpretability’s work to improve model safety
You may be a good fit if you
- Have 5-10+ years of experience building software
- Are highly proficient in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Rust, Go, Java) and productive with python
- Have some experience contributing to empirical AI research projects
- Have a strong ability to prioritize and direct effort toward the most impactful work and are comfortable operating with ambiguity and questioning assumptions
- Prefer fast-moving collaborative projects to extensive solo efforts
- Want to learn more about machine learning research and its applications and collaborate closely with researchers
- Care about the societal impacts and ethics of your work
Strong candidates may also have experience with
- Designing a code base so that anyone can quickly code experiments, launch them, and analyze their results without hitting bugs
- Optimizing the performance of large-scale distributed systems
- Collaborating closely with researchers
- Language modeling with transformers
- GPUs or Pytorch
Representative Projects
- Building Garcon, a tool that allows researchers to easily access LLMs internals from a jupyter notebook
- Setting up and optimizing a pipeline to efficiently collect petabytes of transformer activations and shuffle them
- Profiling and optimizing ML training, including parallelizing to many GPUs
- Make launching ML experiments and manipulating+analyzing the results fast and easy
- Creating an interactive visualization of attention between tokens in a language model
Skills
Python, Rust, Go, Java, PyTorch, Transformers, Gpus, Jupyter, Distributed Systems, Machine Learning
Similar jobs
AI Research jobsConducts hands-on medicinal chemistry research to evaluate AI-generated molecules and synthetic routes, advancing small-molecule programs from design through experimental validation. Requires a chemistry PhD, sustained synthetic experience, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Conducts frontier AI research for health, developing and evaluating scalable training methods, models, and agents that improve medical reasoning, reliability, and real-world outcomes. Requires exceptional machine learning or biomedical AI research depth, hands-on coding and experimentation, and end-to-end ownership of ambiguous problems.
Research Engineer building large-scale AI capability evaluations, telemetry, data pipelines, and analysis tools for Anthropic’s Takeoff Intel team. The role requires hands-on large language model experimentation, rapid prototyping, data expertise, and strong research collaboration.
Research role focused on improving agentic coding capabilities through reinforcement-learning training, synthetic data, coding environments, reward design, and evaluations. Requires strong Python engineering, scalable distributed-training experience, and a bachelor’s degree or equivalent; research experience and a PhD are preferred.
Conduct AI safety research across data curation, post-training, evaluations, synthetic data, and red-teaming to improve model reliability on harmful and dual-use requests. The role requires AI safety experience, Python, deep learning frameworks, and scalable technical research skills.