Alignment Scientist/Engineer

AE Studio is a 160-person ML consultancy dedicated to solving the hardest problems in AI. We use our profits to fund research on the most important problems in AI Safety and Alignment. We partner with top researchers from both academia and industry, including Anthropic, Goodfire AI, Redwood, Princeton, MATS, RAND Corporation, and others. Our research is published in top ML conferences and currently deployed in safety-critical systems.

AE Studio was founded 10 years ago with the goal of helping corporate clients develop humanity-affirming, agency-promoting technology. Since then we’ve developed a reputation for rapidly delivering world-class solutions to their hardest problems. We take the same client-centric approach to research, partnering with the world’s best external researchers to develop world-class results. They provide the vision and our researchers make their ideas a reality.

Our core alignment team is 25 researchers and growing. We hire from all backgrounds. Whether you’re an independent researcher, an engineer, or an academic, AE is a place to make real impact on the single most important problem of our time. We research a diverse set of ambitious alignment directions that others neglect, including pretraining interventions for model safety, novel interpretability techniques, neuroscience-inspired approaches to alignment, and many others. 

You can learn more about our team and work from our Alignment Podcast as well as our research page.

About the role 

Our ideal candidate is a high-agency technical generalist. Our researchers spend ~100% of their time on alignment R&D, working autonomously in fast-paced, high-stakes environments and guiding research direction alongside our collaborators.

About you

• Experienced in ML research, alignment research, or both
• Deeply passionate about AI alignment & believe genuine progress is possible
• Excellent at Python, Pytorch, and the modern deep learning stack
• Knowledgeable about building, training, or evaluating deep learning models
• Comfortable calling AI model APIs via REST or client libraries
• Adept at decomposing complex problems into concrete, testable experiments
• AI-native, and eager to use AI tools to automate your workflow
• Thrives in a fast-paced, startup-like environment
• Adept in English and comfortable communicating technical work to all audiences

Bonus

• Experience performing self-directed research or data science projects (show us what you've built, especially if it increases human agency)
• Software engineering background and best practices
• Agile experience (Kanban, Scrum, XP)
• Experience managing clients and client relationships
• Experience in startups
• Being in LA to work from our office

Benefits

Remote-first with flexible schedules. Coworking spaces available in the Bay Area and NYC. Platinum health insurance, free lunches at the office, weekly knowledge-sharing talks, and an annual team retreat. Regular performance-based raises and a diversified employee equity program.

Compensation

Salary range is $180K to $240K per year for US-based candidates. Not in the range? Apply anyway. We're growing fast and may have other roles opening soon.