Staff Software Engineer, AI Safety

We're building a talent-dense, high-agency AI safety team at Lila that will engage all core teams within the organization (science, model training, lab integration, etc.), to identify and mitigate risks from scientific superintelligence while retaining the core scientific discovery capabilities of the stack. The initial focus of this team will be to build and implement a bespoke safety strategy for Lila, tailored to its specific goals and deployment strategies. This will involve technical safety strategy development, broader ecosystem engagement, safety-focused evaluations, safety systems to mitigate risks, and a research agenda that explores longer-term needs such as oversight of superintelligent scientific systems.

At Lila's AI Safety team, you will build the shared software that helps our team understand and reduce societal risks from scientific AI. Working with researchers, domain scientists and program colleagues, you will turn needs across threat modeling, evaluations, red teaming and mitigation development into reliable tools and systems. You will own engineering work from scoping and prototyping through deployment and ongoing improvement, supporting research across scientific models, agents and automated experimentation.

• Build reusable services, libraries and model/tool integrations that make evaluations, red-teaming campaigns and mitigation experiments repeatable.
• Develop applications that help researchers and scientific experts organize evidence, inspect results, review data and investigate failures.
• Work with safety colleagues to understand research needs and identify shared engineering needs, prioritize useful improvements and turn evolving research workflows into maintainable software.
• Build data pipelines and experiment records that preserve datasets, taxonomies, model versions, configurations and results, making findings traceable and comparisons reproducible.
• Own the reliability and usability of shared safety tools through testing, debugging, monitoring, documentation and continued improvement.
• Collaborate across LILA with our core AI and software engineering teams to share tooling, align on infrastructure, and avoid duplication.

• A track record of independently delivering and maintaining production software, including projects with ambiguous or changing requirements.
• Strong Python and backend engineering skills, with experience designing APIs, working with databases and building dependable data or execution pipelines.
• Experience translating the needs of researchers, domain experts or other technical users into usable tools, and comfort working across services and interfaces.
• Sound engineering judgment in system design, testing and debugging, including practical decisions about reliability, performance and complexity.
• Engineering experience in AI research, AI safety, scientific computing or other settings with rapidly evolving experimental workflows.
• Clear communication and an interest in scientific AI safety, with the ability to understand research context and make informed engineering decisions.

• Building safety-specific tooling.
• Building full-stack internal applications, annotation or review tools, or systems for managing experimental evidence.
• Experience with distributed experiment execution, model-serving integrations or isolated environments for agent evaluations.

Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

Information you provide during your application process will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy.

Lila Sciences does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of unsolicited resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Lila Sciences or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Lila Science’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Lila Sciences, and Lila Sciences will not owe any referral or other fees with respect thereto.