Member of Technical Staff, Embedded Assessments

Team: Engineering & Research

Location: Berkeley

Commitment: Employee

Workplace Type: onsite

Salary:

Overview

METR has started embedding researchers inside frontier labs to investigate incidents, stress-test labs’ internal agent monitoring systems, and assess loss-of-control risks from internal deployment. As agent capabilities increase, we expect this to be one of the most important sources of independent information the world has about catastrophic risks from advanced AI. 

As the source of information becomes more important, we'll need many more talented researchers and engineers who can conduct embedded exercises. We expect these assessors to have deep access, and for their work to be a large part of METR's impact in the next year. We want to build on the momentum from previous exercises to further develop our risk assessments.

What the job looks like

You'll be embedded in a frontier AI lab for up to several weeks at a time, likely alongside 1-4 other METR staff. Between exercises, you'll practice, develop the general methodology, talk to other researchers, build tooling to make future exercises go better, help us hire and scale, write up results, and plan/coordinate future exercises.

We are looking for embedded researchers and engineers across multiple current and potential future exercises: AI R&D acceleration assessment, compute allocation, monitorability red-teaming, incident investigations, and more. We expect this role to evolve significantly as we develop and prototype this new form of risk assessment.

Ideal candidate

We are looking for candidates with at least two of the following skills, although the ideal candidate will have most or all of them: 

You’re good at prompting LLMs, are familiar with research relevant to the fields above (or can get up to speed quickly).

You have some security experience. 

You can get spun up on large codebases quickly. 

You’re scrappy, creative, independent, and self-directed (because during the exercises you’ll only have a few other METR employees you can talk to). The work is novel and you’ll need to figure a lot of stuff out on the fly largely by yourself.

You are excellent at loss-of-control threat modeling and breaking down safety cases. 

You’re good at verbal communication, writing, and stakeholder management (e.g., navigating complex relationships with frontier labs). 

You’re trustworthy and have a good reputation.