Staff / Principal Research Engineer, AI Safety Mitigations
Lila Sciences4 days ago
Base Salary
$224k - $336k/yr
Responsibilities
- Translate scientific risk assessments, dual-use policy boundaries, and evaluation findings into mitigation designs and testable requirements.
- Develop and implement safeguards across model training, classifiers, monitoring, access controls, and runtime interventions.
- Build experiments measuring risk reduction, robustness, legitimate-use impacts, and performance constraints.
- Use adversarial findings and observed failures to improve safeguards.
- Integrate mitigations with model-training, post-training, inference, and platform teams across development, release evaluation, and large-scale serving systems.
- Investigate regressions, distribution shifts, and emerging misuse patterns to guide further development.
Requirements
- Hands-on experience developing and validating safety interventions for frontier models in training, post-training, or large-scale inference systems.
- Depth in at least one area such as safety post-training, model-level classifiers, inference safeguards, or abuse monitoring and enforcement across a model-serving platform.
- Experience working with model-development or safeguards teams using training pipelines, model internals, inference infrastructure, or systematic evaluation access.
- Strong research-engineering skills and ability to create maintainable implementations from ambiguous problems.
- Sound experimental judgment, including robustness assessment, interpretation of imperfect metrics, and reasoning about competing objectives.
- Ability to collaborate across research and engineering teams, explain technical trade-offs, and own complex individual contributions.
- Preferred experience with scientific models, scientific software, laboratory-connected systems, tool-using agents, multi-step workflows, high-consequence misuse, or connecting expert evidence and policy requirements to training data, evaluation criteria, or operational controls.
Benefits
- Competitive base compensation with bonus potential and generous early-stage equity.
- U.S. full-time employees receive medical, dental, and vision coverage; employer-paid life and disability insurance; flexible time off; company-wide holidays; paid parental leave; educational assistance; commuter benefits including bike-share memberships for office-based employees; and a subsidized lunch program.
- International full-time employees receive a region-specific comprehensive benefits program.
- Full-time employment; USD salary ranges apply only to U.S.-based positions, with international salaries set to local market.
Categories
About Lila Sciences
Lila Sciences builds an AI-driven research platform and autonomous lab systems for life science, chemistry, and materials R&D teams. Its products combine large AI models with robotic instruments to plan, run, and analyze experiments, integrating into customer-specific scientific workflows. The privately held company serves pharma, materials, and energy organizations and is venture-backed, including a Series A financing in 2025.