Alignment Scientist/Engineer
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AE Studio
Marina Del Rey, CA, US
Summary
Conduct high-upside AI alignment research on projects focused on powerful AI systems and recursive self-improvement. Collaborate with external visionaries to execute concrete experiments and ship impactful research results.
Job Description
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.
AE Studio does frontier AI alignment research, AI strategy, and production AI system development.
Bootstrapped. ~150 people. No outside investors. Founded in 2016 in Los Angeles. The independence means we fund alignment research without anyone telling us to stop and we only take on work we actually believe in.
Our alignment work includes collaborations with DARPA and Anthropic, publications at top AI conferences, and active research on gradient routing, self-other overlap, endogenous steering resistance, multi-agent systems and several other neglected approaches. We think AI is going to be the most transformative technology of our lifetimes, and we want to make sure it goes well. That means doing the research now, while we still have time to get it right.
We bring the same rigor we apply to frontier AI research to helping companies effectively leverage AI. We start with the business problem, not the technology. Technology is moving at a pace that is faster than ever before and we help companies figure out what to do with that: how to restructure teams around AI, where humans add the most value, which problems are worth solving and in what order. We've generated $6M+ in extra weekly revenue for airline companies, developed state-of-the-art neural decoders for brain-computer interface systems, and enabled education companies to serve 10x more students with a 90% contractor cost reduction.
Founded
2016
Company size
51-200 employees
Industry
Software Development
Org type
Privately Held
Headquarters
Marina del Rey, California
AE Studio does frontier AI alignment research, AI strategy, and production AI system development.
Bootstrapped. ~150 people. No outside investors. Founded in 2016 in Los Angeles. The independence means we fund alignment research without anyone telling us to stop and we only take on work we actually believe in.
Our alignment work includes collaborations with DARPA and Anthropic, publications at top AI conferences, and active research on gradient routing, self-other overlap, endogenous steering resistance, multi-agent systems and several other neglected approaches. We think AI is going to be the most transformative technology of our lifetimes, and we want to make sure it goes well. That means doing the research now, while we still have time to get it right.
We bring the same rigor we apply to frontier AI research to helping companies effectively leverage AI. We start with the business problem, not the technology. Technology is moving at a pace that is faster than ever before and we help companies figure out what to do with that: how to restructure teams around AI, where humans add the most value, which problems are worth solving and in what order. We've generated $6M+ in extra weekly revenue for airline companies, developed state-of-the-art neural decoders for brain-computer interface systems, and enabled education companies to serve 10x more students with a 90% contractor cost reduction.
Founded
2016
Company size
51-200 employees
Industry
Software Development
Org type
Privately Held
Headquarters
Marina del Rey, California