Apolloresearch13h ago

New

GBP 100000–200000/yr

Research Scientist (Control)

London & San FranciscoFull-timemid

Data ScientistData

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Quick Summary

Overview

THE OPPORTUNITY Join our new AGI safety product team and help transform AI control research into practical tools that directly reduce risks from AI. As an Research Scientist (Control),

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Data ScientistData

Join our new AGI safety product team and help transform AI control research into practical tools that directly reduce risks from AI. As an Research Scientist (Control), you’ll work closely with Marius (CEO & currently leads the monitoring efforts), other control researchers and product engineers.

We are currently building Watcher, a monitoring tool for coding agents. Our monitoring research agenda attempts to translate compute into safety at scale. You will join a small team and will have significant ability to shape the team & tech, and have the ability to earn responsibility quickly.

You will like this opportunity if you're passionate about using empirical research to make AI systems safer in practice. You enjoy the challenge of translating theoretical AI risks into concrete detection mechanisms. You thrive on rapid iteration and learning from data. You want your research to directly impact real-world AI safety.

TLDR: you will design & implement control protocols (see e.g. [Greenblatt et al, 2023]) and test them on real-world production systems at scale.

Design and conduct experiments to test monitor effectiveness across different failure modes and agent behaviors

Build and maintain evaluation frameworks to measure progress on monitoring capabilities

Build and maintain high-quality datasets to train and test monitors on

Iterate on monitoring approaches based on empirical results, balancing detection accuracy with computational efficiency

Contribute newly discovered coding agent failure modes to Apollo's shared failure mode library (owned by the AI Security & Control Researcher/Engineer) as they surface during monitor design, evaluation, and iteration

Stay current with research on AI safety, agent failures, and detection methodologies

Stay current with research into coding security and safety vulnerabilities

Fine-tuning & Monitor Development

Fine-tune open-source models to create efficient monitors for high-volume production environments

Design and build agentic monitoring systems that autonomously investigate logs to identify both known and novel failure modes

Incorporate adversarial findings from red-teaming campaigns into monitor design and evaluation, closing the loop between attack and defense

2+ years of experience conducting empirical research with large language models or AI systems

Strong experience with AI coding agents. For example, having extensively used and compared frontier coding agents, or having designed / developed coding agents

Experience with LLM-as-a-judge setups or AI monitoring more broadly

Experience designing and running experiments, analyzing results, and iterating based on empirical findings e.g. prompting, scaffolding, agent design, fine-tuning, or RL

Strong Python programming skills

Demonstrated ability to work independently on open-ended research problems

Familiarity with AI safety concepts, particularly agent-related risks

Familiarity with computer security, e.g. security testing and secure system design

Experience fine-tuning language models or working with smaller open-source models

Previous work building developer tools or monitoring systems

Publications or contributions to AI safety or ML research

Experience with production log systems or production log analysis

We want to emphasize that people who feel they don't fulfill all of these characteristics but think they would be a good fit for the position nonetheless are strongly encouraged to apply. We believe that excellent candidates can come from a variety of backgrounds and are excited to give you opportunities to shine.

What We Offer

~1 min read

Salary: San Francisco: $204,000 – $385,000; London: £136,000 – £258,000. We will be looking to meaningfully raise salaries soon.

Flexible work hours and schedule

Unlimited vacation

Unlimited sick leave

Up to 6 months of paid parental leave

Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance

Retirement savings with competitive employer matching (e.g. 401(k) for US employees)

Lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays

Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences

A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget

Relocation support and visa fees (if applicable)

Time Allocation: Full-time

Location: This is an in-person role working out of our London or San Francisco office. We offer flexible working hours and wfh arrangements.

Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in both the UK and US. Sponsorship isn't guaranteed for every role or candidate, but if we make you an offer, we'll work with you to find the right visa route.

✓Salary: San Francisco: $204,000 – $385,000; London: £136,000 – £258,000. We will be looking to meaningfully raise salaries soon.

✓Flexible work hours and schedule

✓Unlimited vacation

✓Unlimited sick leave

✓Up to 6 months of paid parental leave

✓Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance

✓Retirement savings with competitive employer matching (e.g. 401(k) for US employees)

✓Lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays

✓Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences

✓A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget

✓Relocation support and visa fees (if applicable)

✓Time Allocation: Full-time

✓Location: This is an in-person role working out of our London or San Francisco office. We offer flexible working hours and wfh arrangements.

✓Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in both the UK and US. Sponsorship isn't guaranteed for every role or candidate, but if we make you an offer, we'll work with you to find the right visa route.