Member of Technical Staff, Research

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.