Description
We are seeking a Biological Safety Research Scientist to join our Safeguards team. As a member of this team, you will apply your technical skills to design and develop safety systems that detect harmful behaviors and prevent misuse by sophisticated threat actors. You will be at the forefront of defining what responsible AI safety looks like in the biological domain, working across research, policy, and engineering to translate complex biosecurity concepts into concrete technical safeguards.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and execute capability evaluations to assess the capabilities of new models
- Collaborate closely with internal and external threat modeling experts to develop training data for our safety systems, and with ML engineers to train these safety systems, optimizing for both robustness against adversarial attacks and low false-positive rates for legitimate researchers
- Analyze safety system performance in traffic, identifying gaps and proposing improvements
- Develop rigorous stress-testing of our safeguards against evolving threats and product surfaces
- Partner with Research, Product, and Policy teams to ensure biological safety is embedded throughout the model development lifecycle
- Contribute to external communications, including model cards, blog posts, and policy documents related to biological safety
- Monitor emerging technologies for their potential to contribute to new risks and new mitigation strategies, and strategically address these
You may be a good fit for this role if you have a PhD in molecular biology, virology, microbiology, biochemistry, systems or computational biology, or a related life sciences field, or equivalent professional experience. You should also have extensive experience in scientific computing and data analysis, with proficiency in programming (Python preferred), deep expertise in modern biology, including both 'reading' and 'writing' techniques in biology, familiarity with dual-use research concerns, select agent regulations, and biosecurity frameworks, strong analytical and writing skills, and a passion for learning new skills and adapting to changing techniques and technologies.
Preferred qualifications include background in AI/ML systems, particularly experience with large language models, experience in developing ML for biological systems, and extensive experience in complex projects with multiple stakeholders.