Senior Research Engineer
GW512
Posted: 09/06/2026
- $200,000-$300,000
- San Francisco, CA
- Permanent
About the job
🚀 Senior Research Engineer | Interpretability, Alignment & Experimental AI Systems
📍 San Francisco (Onsite)
💰 Highly Competitive Compensation + Equity
I'm partnering with an early-stage AI research lab tackling one of the biggest challenges in AI today: Understanding what is actually happening inside advanced models.
This team is focused on interpretability, alignment, reinforcement learning, and representation engineering, building tools that allow researchers to inspect, measure, and steer model behaviour at the activation level.
You'll work on:
🔹 Mechanistic interpretability and activation analysis
🔹 Experimental RL environments and alignment research
🔹 Concept detection, probing, and model steering
🔹 Formal methods, program analysis, and verification-inspired approaches to AI safety
🔹 Greenfield research systems built from scratch
We're looking for exceptional engineers and researchers from backgrounds including:
✔️ AI/ML Research
✔️ Interpretability & Alignment
✔️ Reinforcement Learning
✔️ Programming Languages & Compilers
✔️ Formal Verification
✔️ Systems & Security Research
Machine Learning & AI Research:
- Interpretability research
- Alignment or AI safety research
- Reinforcement learning
- Representation learning
- Experimental ML systems
Systems & Formal Methods:
- Programming languages research
- Compilers and runtime systems
- Formal verification
- Program analysis
- Theorem proving
- Security research
Engineering & Research Infrastructure:
- Building experimental software systems from scratch
- Research engineering in highly ambiguous environments
- Developing tools for scientific discovery and experimentation
- Working close to model internals and low-level systems
Desired Experience:
- Strong software engineering fundamentals
- Experience building research prototypes rather than production systems
- Ability to independently drive complex technical projects
- Strong abstraction and systems thinking skills
- Experience working in highly exploratory research environments
PhD preferred but not required.
This Role Is Not:
- Large-scale distributed training engineering
- MLOps or production infrastructure
- Data engineering pipelines
- Traditional applied machine learning
- Incremental product optimisation
- Conventional software verification roles
If you're interested in understanding how models reason, not just improving what they output and want to work on foundational AI research alongside a highly technical team, I'd love to speak with you.
Ashley Willing
Researcher