Description
Member of Technical Staff, Research
Team: Engineering & Research
Location: Berkeley
Commitment: Employee
Workplace Type: onsite
Salary:
For very experienced and exceptional researchers, we are open to exploring paying much higher than this stated range.
The listed range applies to the base salary for this role. METR also has a host of benefits:
- The office: Catered lunch and dinner daily; in-office gym and shower
- Relocation support: Stipend for moving to the Bay Area
- Time-off and leave: Unlimited PTO and 21-week parental leave for new parents
- Commuter benefit: Monthly transit/parking stipend and an annual Uber budget
- Professional development benefit: for training, courses, conferences, and AI safety education
- Mental health benefit: for therapy, medication, and other mental health expenses
- Wellness benefit: for gym memberships and other wellness expenses
- Work equipment benefit: for home office and workstation equipment expenses
NOTE: If you previously applied to one of our Research Engineer/Scientist, Machine Learning Research Engineer/Scientist, or Research Stream Lead roles, you do not need to apply again. We are merging all inbound applications for researcher roles into this one.
About METR
We are a nonprofit research organization that develops scientific methods to assess AI capabilities, risks and mitigations, with a specific focus on threats related to autonomy, AI R&D automation, and alignment.
We believe it is robustly good for civilization to have a clearer understanding of what dangers AI systems pose, and we are extremely excited to find ambitious, excellent people to join our team and tackle one of the most important challenges of our time.
We evaluate candidates primarily through work tests. We usually do an in-person trial as well but can be flexible about this.
What We're Looking For
METR currently has 3 primary research streams:
- Capabilities: Accurately measuring frontier model performance on threat-relevant tasks (autonomy, AI R&D automation, etc.) and predicting future capabilities. We develop and maintain benchmarks, diverse evidence-gathering methods, and metrics to track capability trends and anticipate the thresholds that matter most for safety.
- Monitorability: Understanding how well frontier models can take subversive or unwanted actions despite various monitoring or control protocols. We build the research infrastructure – novel metrics, control evaluations, elicitation methods – needed to improve the world's understanding of how effectively current and future models can circumvent oversight.
- Alignment/Propensity: Determining whether or not a model that is capable of causing catastrophic harm (in its actual deployment setting) would be likely to actually do so in a given high-stakes deployment setting. We aim to develop the science of propensity evaluations and examine when we might expect high-stakes catastrophic misalignment.
The Capabilities and Monitorability streams are both hiring Research ICs (individual contributors), while the Alignment/Propensity stream is hiring for a Research Stream Lead, followed by Research ICs down the line. The stream you end up joining will be based on a combination of working fit and interest.
For our Research IC roles, we are looking for a combination of skills across “research science”, “research execution” and software engineering. You may not have all of these skills (for example, we don’t expect software engineering to be a large part of the role for narrowly focused researchers). For the Research Stream Lead role, we are additionally looking for research management skills.
Research Science
- You have strong knowledge of relevant literature and general research good practice.
- You have good understanding of how particular projects fit into METR's overall mission - you are thinking about things like "how will this generalize to future models", or "how does this relate to alignment evals".
- You reliably notice important but subtle methodological limitations.
- You are undaunted by open-ended mandates - you can take a confusing or ill-posed question and produce insightful and helpful frameworks / proposals / results.
- You can write great papers.
Research Execution
- You are an experienced executor/contributor; you are familiar with patterns of successful and unsuccessful execution in frontier ML research. You are undaunted by "I've never done this before" or even "no-one has done this before".
- You are creative, ambitious and entrepreneurial. You work fast and are highly responsive and available. You can juggle many balls when it is useful.
Software Engineering
- You balance rapid prototyping with the creation of maintainable, scalable systems and make sound technical decisions.
- You lead large projects from ideation to delivery, balancing innovative ML solutions with reliable, high-quality code.
- You set high standards for system architecture, code quality, and maintainability, influencing broad software practices across the organization.
- We're seeking a researcher to help us better understand AI capabilities. Previous work in this vein includes agent time horizons, a commonly-used metric for measuring AI progress, and RCTs on open-source developer productivity.
Research Management
- You can set a compelling and coherent research agenda for a team - you translate high-level goals into tractable projects that serve METR's mission.
- You have experience hiring and developing researchers; you have good judgment about what makes someone excellent, and you actively invest in the growth of your team members.
- You can hold a team to high standards while being comfortable with fast-moving/scrappy research workflows - you know when to push for rigor and when to ship, and you help others develop this judgment too.
- You are an effective technical manager - you can meaningfully evaluate the work of researchers across a range of subproblems, give useful feedback, and catch things going wrong early.
- You communicate clearly with leadership and stakeholders - you surface the right information, flag risks proactively, and represent your team's work effectively.
Our Culture
METR is a mission-driven organization. We believe our work can meaningfully shape humanity's future for the better, and we want to be the best people in the world doing this work. We have a tight-knit, collaborative research culture rooted in truth-seeking and integrity. We're fiercely committed to producing high-quality, trustworthy science. We're honest and transparent about our results, especially when they may go against the grain. We've earned trust as reliable partners who handle confidential information with care. We maintain a low-ego, drama-free environment focused on what matters.
Hybrid Requirements: Our technical team members are in our office in Berkeley 3-5 days/week. Please let us know in your application if this is a constraint. If you lack US work authorization and would like to work in-person (strongly preferred), we can likely sponsor a cap-exempt H-1B visa for this role.
We encourage you to apply even if your background may not seem like the perfect fit! We would rather review a larger pool of applications than risk missing out on a promising candidate for the position.
We are committed to diversity and equal opportunity in all aspects of our hiring process. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We welcome and encourage all qualified candidates to apply for our open positions.
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