Apollo Research

Research Scientist (Control)

London & San Francisco · Full-time

H1B sponsorship available$100k-$200kDetected 217 days ago

PythonSQLMachine LearningLLMsLogisticsResearch

About the role

Join our new AGI safety product team and help transform AI control research into practical tools that directly reduce risks from AI.
Our monitoring research agenda attempts to translate compute into safety at scale.

TLDR: you will design & implement control protocols (see e.g. [Greenblatt et al, 2023] ) and test them on real-world production systems at scale.
Design and conduct experiments to test monitor effectiveness across different failure modes and agent behaviors
Build and maintain evaluation frameworks to measure progress on monitoring capabilities
Build and maintain high-quality datasets to train and test monitors on
Monitor Design & Optimization
Develop & maintain a comprehensive library of monitoring prompts tailored to specific failure modes (e.g., security vulnerabilities, goal misalignment, deceptive behaviors)
Design and test hierarchical monitoring architectures and ensemble approaches
Optimize log pre-processing pipelines to extract relevant signals while minimizing latency and computational costs
Relocation support and visa fees (if applicable)

2+ years of experience conducting empirical research with large language models or AI systems
Strong experience with AI coding agents.
Experience with LLM-as-a-judge setups or AI monitoring more broadly
Demonstrated ability to work independently on open-ended research problems
You will join a small team and will have significant ability to shape the team & tech, and have the ability to earn responsibility quickly.
You enjoy the challenge of translating theoretical AI risks into concrete detection mechanisms.

Familiarity with AI safety concepts, particularly agent-related risks
Experience fine-tuning language models or working with smaller open-source models
Publications or contributions to AI safety or ML research
Experience with production log systems or production log analysis

The rapid rise in AI capabilities offer tremendous opportunities, but also present significant risks.

Lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays
Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences
A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget
Relocation support and visa fees (if applicable)
Salary: 100k - 200 GBP (~150k - 270k USD)

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.
Flexible work hours and schedule
Unlimited vacation
Unlimited sick leave
Up to 6 months of paid parental leave
Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance
Retirement savings with competitive employer matching (e.g. 401(k) for US employees)

The Product team is a new team.
Especially early on, you will work closely with Marius Hobbhahn (CEO & currently leads the monitoring team), Victor Gillioz (Research Scientist), Monika Jotautaitė (Research
Jeremy Neiman, Zak Walters, Zen van Riel, and Srdjan Miletic.
Furthermore you will interact with our other SWEs and researchers, since we intend to be "our own customer" by using our products internally for our research work.
You can find our full team here.
We are currently building Watcher, a monitoring tool for coding agents.
Your Privacy and Fairness in Our Recruitment Process: We are committed to protecting your data, ensuring fairness, and adhering to workplace fairness principles in our recruitment process.

We sponsor visas in both the UK and US.
Sponsorship isn't guaranteed for every role or candidate, but if we make you an offer, we'll work with you to find the right visa route.

This listing is sourced directly from Apollo Research's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.