Senior Research Scientist - AI Safety
- Part-time
About the role
As a Senior Research Scientist at Faculty, you will join our high-impact R&D team to lead original technical research that advances our understanding of safe AI systems. Operating with high agency, you will balance scientific rigour with practical relevance to shape the future of safe AI deployment. Working closely with our broader AI safety practice, your scientific outputs—ranging from peer-reviewed publications to technical tooling—will directly inform frontier labs and government institutes, driving our entrepreneurial ambition to build a safer technological future.
What you'll be doing:
Leading original technical research in AI safety, steering projects from initial research question to high-impact publication.
Shaping the research agenda by identifying high-impact projects that balance scientific rigour with real-world relevance.
Contributing thought leadership and deep technical expertise to support wider evaluation and red-teaming efforts.
Supporting our positioning as a global leader through active external engagement with frontier labs and government stakeholders.
Developing robust, reproducible research code and engineering infrastructure to accelerate our scientific discovery.
Collaborating with cross-functional safety teams to translate fundamental research into practical mitigation strategies.
Who we're looking for:
Strong track record in AI research, evidenced by publications or equivalent experience, alongside the ability to tackle open, unsolved problems.
Capability to own research end-to-end, moving independently from framing novel problems to generating high-quality research artifacts.
Passion for technical AI safety, whether developed in academia, industry labs, or evaluation roles.
Deep knowledge of language models and generative AI architectures, including white-box techniques beyond API-level access.
Strong foundation in machine learning fundamentals, particularly in robustness, explainability, or uncertainty estimation.
Proficiency with deep learning frameworks like PyTorch and the Python skills required to build robust research tooling.
Our Recruitment Ethos
We aim to grow the best team - not the most similar one. We know that diversity of individuals fosters diversity of thought, and that strengthens our principle of seeking truth. And we know from experience that diverse teams deliver better work, relevant to the world in which we live. We’re united by a deep intellectual curiosity and desire to use our abilities for measurable positive impact. We strongly encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, religions and sexual orientations.
If you don’t feel you meet all the requirements, but are excited by the role and know you bring some key strengths, please don't hesitate in applying as you might be right for this role, or other roles. We are open to conversations about part-time hours.
A note on AI: we're happy for you to use it for research and interview prep, but please don't use it to generate answers during live interviews. We also use an AI note-taker (Metaview) in interviews so interviewers can stay present (which you can opt out of just let us know,) and every application is reviewed by a human, never decided by AI.