AI Engineer & Researcher - Safety (Alignment)

About xAI

xAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organization is for individuals who appreciate challenging themselves and thrive on curiosity. We operate with a flat organizational structure. All employees are expected to be hands-on and to contribute directly to the company’s mission. Leadership is given to those who show initiative and consistently deliver excellence. Work ethic and strong prioritization skills are important. All engineers and researchers are expected to have strong communication skills. They should be able to concisely and accurately share knowledge with their teammates.

About the Role

xAI is seeking talented researchers and engineers to improve the safety of our AI systems and ensure that they are maximally beneficial for society.

In this role, you will work toward measuring and architecting the behavior of our frontier AI systems across a wide variety of safety-relevant areas such as truth-seeking and deception. You will work across all stages of the model development pipeline, from collaborating with legal and product teams to iterate on policy guidelines, building new benchmarks to quantify novel behaviors, running human data collection projects, experimenting with novel post-training and reasoning training recipes, and shipping product updates to millions of users around the world.

Focus

Candidates for this role may focus on one or more of the following:

• Ensure truth-seeking behavior by Grok even in adverse situations
• Measuring and steering Grok’s propensities for deception, sycophancy, and power-seeking
• Developing and enforcing clear, consistent policy guidelines across models and products
• Building ecologically valid benchmarks to assess agentic propensities and capabilities

Ideal experience

The ideal candidate:

• has strong software engineering skills,
• has a background in post-training or evaluating frontier AI systems,
• is a team player and willing to pick up new skills to get the job done.

Location

• We hire engineers in Palo Alto. Our team usually works from the office 5 days a week but allow work-from-home days when required. Candidates are expected to be located near Palo Alto or open to relocation.

Interview Process

After submitting your application, the team reviews your CV and statement of exceptional work. If your application passes this stage, you will be invited to a 15 minute interview (“phone interview”) during which a member of our team will ask some basic questions. If you clear the initial phone interview, you will enter the main process, which consists of four technical interviews:

1. Coding assessment in a language of your choice.
2. Researcher technical sessions (2): These sessions will be testing your ability to formulate, design and solve concrete problems in real world with LLM. It can be research or engineering, depending on background/experience.
3. Meet the Team: Present your past exceptional work and your vision with xAI to a small audience.

Our goal is to finish the main process within one week. All interviews will be conducted via Google Meet.

Annual Salary Range

$180,000 - $440,000 USD

xAI is an equal opportunity employer.

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