Machine Learning Research Lead, Security and Policy Research Lab

Machine Learning Research Lead, Security & Policy Research Lab
As the leading data and evaluation partner for frontier AI companies, Scale plays an integral role in understanding the capabilities and safeguarding AI models and systems. Building on this expertise, Scale has launched a new team, the Scale AI Security and Policy Research Lab, to bridge the gap between AI researchers and global policymakers to make informed, scientific decisions about AI risks and capabilities.
Scale is seeking a highly experienced, thoughtful, and mission-driven research lead to drive this teams research priorities to tackle the hardest problems in agent robustness, AI control protocols, and AI risk evaluations. Our research team will act as a central hub for generating the data and insights necessary to inform benchmarking and evaluations for AI models and systems, with a focus on how to utilize this research to inform secure, responsible, and innovative AI governance globally. SPRLs research team is shaping the next generation of safety science for frontier AI models and works at the leading edge of frontier risk evaluations, agent robustness, and AI controls. Some of our current research includes:
Designing and building harnesses to test AI models and systems (including agents) for dangerous capabilities such as hacking or exploiting security vulnerabilities;
Conducting uplift research studies related to potentially dangerous chemical, biological, nuclear, or radiological (CBRN) AI-enabled uplift;
Developing AIassisted evaluation pipelines, where models help critique, grade, and explain outputs related to frontier risk (e.g. Collaborating with policymakers, engineers, and other researchers to establish standards and benchmarks for AI monitoring and escalation.
Lead a team of research scientists and engineers on foundational AI safety and security work in evaluation and robustness.
Drive research initiatives on frameworks and benchmarks for frontier AI models, spanning reasoning, coding, multimodal, and agentic behaviors.
Collaborate with leading research labs across industry and academia.
Publish research at toptier venues and contribute to opensource benchmarking initiatives.
Remain deeply engaged with the research community, both understanding trends and setting them.
Track record of impactful research in machine learning, especially in generative AI, evaluation, or oversight.
Significant experience leading ML research in academia or industry.
Experience building and mentoring teams of research scientists and engineers.
Publications at major ML/AI conferences (e.g. Our research interviews are crafted to assess candidates skills in practical ML prototyping and debugging, their grasp of research concepts, and their alignment with our organizational culture. Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position, determined by work location and additional factors, including jobrelated skills, experience, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equitybased compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. Comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Please reference the job postings subtitle for where this position will be located. For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this fulltime position in the locations of San Francisco, New York, Seattle is:
$PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. Our products provide the highquality data and fullstack technologies that power the worlds leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.
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