At a Glance
- Tasks: Transform AI control research into practical tools to enhance AI safety.
- Company: Join a pioneering team at Apollo Research focused on AI safety.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, unlimited vacation, flexible hours, and comprehensive health benefits.
- Other info: Dynamic team environment with opportunities for rapid growth and innovation.
- Why this job: Make a real-world impact on AI safety while working with cutting-edge technology.
- Qualifications: Passion for empirical research and experience in AI safety and monitoring.
The predicted salary is between 100000 - 200000 £ per year.
Join our AGI safety product team to transform AI control research into practical tools that reduce risks from AI. As a Research Scientist (Control), you will work closely with the CEO, control researchers, and product engineers. We are building Watcher, a monitoring tool for coding agents, and our monitoring research agenda translates compute into safety at scale. You will join a small team with significant opportunity to shape the team and technology and to take on responsibility quickly. You will like this opportunity if you are passionate about using empirical research to make AI systems safer in practice, enjoy translating theoretical AI risks into concrete detection mechanisms, thrive on rapid iteration and learning from data, and want your research to directly impact real-world AI safety.
Responsibilities
- Systematically collect and catalog coding agent failure modes from real-world instances, internal deployments, public examples, research literature, and theoretical predictions.
- 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.
- Iterate on monitoring approaches based on empirical results, balancing detection accuracy with computational efficiency.
- Stay current with AI safety research, agent failures, and detection methodologies.
- Stay current with research into coding security and safety vulnerabilities.
Monitor Design & Optimization
- Develop and maintain a comprehensive library of monitoring prompts tailored to specific failure modes (e.g., security vulnerabilities, goal misalignment, deceptive behaviors).
- Experiment with reasoning strategies and output formats to improve monitor reliability.
- Design and test hierarchical monitoring architectures and ensemble approaches.
- Optimize log pre-processing pipelines to extract signals while minimizing latency and costs.
- Implement and evaluate scaffolding approaches for monitors, including chain-of-thought reasoning, structured outputs, and multi-step verification.
Fine-tuning & Red-teaming
- 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 known and novel failure modes.
- Build automated red-teaming pipelines that attack monitors at scale.
- Design iterative adversarial games where a red team and blue team continuously attack and defend.
Role perks
- This role offers a market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.
- Salary: 100k - 200 GBP (~150k - 270k USD).
- Flexible work hours and schedule.
- Unlimited vacation and unlimited sick leave.
- Up to 6 months of paid parental leave.
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
- Retirement savings with employer matching.
- Lunch, dinner, and snacks provided on workdays.
- Paid work trips, staff retreats, and relevant conferences.
- Yearly professional development budget.
- Relocation support and visa fees (if applicable).
Location: In-person role in London or San Francisco with flexible hours and work-from-home arrangements.
Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in the UK and US; sponsorship is not guaranteed for every role or candidate, but we will work to find the right visa route if an offer is made.
About the Team
The Product team is new. You will work closely with Marius Hobbhahn (CEO, leads the monitoring team), Victor Gillioz (Research Scientist), Monika Jotautaitė (Research Scientist), and our product engineers. You will interact with other SWEs and researchers as we aim to be our own customer by using our products internally for research.
About Apollo Research
The rapid rise in AI capabilities offers opportunities but also risks from Loss of Control. We focus on detection and mitigations of scheming and related risks and work with frontier AI companies to test models before deployment. We aim for a culture of truth-seeking, goal orientation, constructive feedback, and friendliness.
Equality Statement: Apollo Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and provide equal opportunities regardless of age, disability, gender identity, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.
How to Apply
Please complete the application form with your CV. A cover letter is not required. Feel free to share links to relevant work samples. Interview process: multi-stage with a screening interview, a take-home test (about 2 hours), three technical interviews, and a final interview with the CEO. Technical interviews relate to tasks you would perform on the job. If you want to prepare, consider building simple monitors for coding agents and testing them on your own Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex traffic.
Your Privacy and Fairness: We protect your data, uphold fairness, and use AI-powered tools to assist with tasks such as resume screening in compliance with AI governance frameworks. Resumes are screened by humans and final decisions are made by our team. For questions about data processing or concerns about fairness, contact us.
