Research Scientist (Control) in London

Join our new AGI safety product team and help transform AI control research into practical tools that directly reduce risks from AI. As a Research Scientist (Control), you’ll work closely with other control researchers and product engineers. We are currently building Watcher, a monitoring tool for coding agents. Our monitoring research agenda attempts to translate compute into safety at scale. 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 will like this opportunity if you're passionate about using empirical research to make AI systems safer in practice. You enjoy the challenge of translating theoretical AI risks into concrete detection mechanisms. You thrive on rapid iteration and learning from data. You want your research to directly impact real-world AI safety.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Design & implement control protocols and test them on real-world production systems at scale.
• Design and conduct experiments to test monitor effectiveness across different failure modes and agent behaviours.
• Build and maintain evaluation frameworks to measure progress on monitoring capabilities.
• Build and maintain high-quality datasets to train and test monitors on.
• Iterate on monitoring approaches based on empirical results, balancing detection accuracy with computational efficiency.
• Contribute newly discovered coding agent failure modes to Apollo's shared failure mode library as they surface during monitor design, evaluation, and iteration.
• Stay current with research on AI safety, agent failures, and detection methodologies.
• Fine-tune open-source models to create efficient monitors for high-volume production environments.
• Design and build agentic monitoring systems that autonomously investigate logs to identify both known and novel failure modes.
• Incorporate adversarial findings from red-teaming campaigns into monitor design and evaluation.

JOB REQUIREMENTS

Must-haves:

• 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.
• Experience designing and running experiments, analysing results, and iterating based on empirical findings.
• Strong Python programming skills.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently on open-ended research problems.

Good-to-haves:

• Familiarity with AI safety concepts, particularly agent-related risks.
• Familiarity with computer security, e.g. security testing and secure system design.
• Experience fine-tuning language models or working with smaller open-source models.
• Previous work building developer tools or monitoring systems.
• Publications or contributions to AI safety or ML research.
• Experience with production log systems or production log analysis.

We want to emphasise that people who feel they don't fulfil all of these characteristics but think they would be a good fit for the position nonetheless are strongly encouraged to apply.

BENEFITS

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.
• 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).

LOGISTICS

Time Allocation: Full-time. Location: This is an in-person role working out of our London or San Francisco office. We offer flexible working hours and WFH arrangements. Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in both the UK and US.

ABOUT THE TEAM

The product team consists of research scientists and product engineers. Marius Hobbhahn (CEO) advises the team. 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.

ABOUT APOLLO RESEARCH

At Apollo Research, we're primarily concerned with risks from Loss of Control. We're particularly concerned with deceptive alignment / scheming. We work on the science of scheming, detection of scheming, and scheming mitigations. We also work on control and monitoring research. At Apollo, we aim for a culture that emphasizes truth-seeking, being goal-oriented, giving and receiving constructive feedback, and being friendly and helpful.

EQUALITY STATEMENT

Apollo Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and are committed to providing equal opportunities to all.

HOW TO APPLY

Please complete the application form with your CV. The provision of a cover letter is neither required nor encouraged. Please also feel free to share links to relevant work samples.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEW PROCESS

Our multi-stage process includes a screening interview, a take-home test, technical interviews, and a final interview with Marius (CEO). There are no leetcode-style general coding interviews. You may use AI tools on the take-home; we judge the result the way we'd judge any contributor's work.

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.