Research Engineer

About Us

FAR.AI is a non-profit AI research institute working to ensure advanced AI is safe and beneficial for everyone. Our mission is to facilitate breakthrough AI safety research, advance global understanding of AI risks and solutions, and foster a coordinated global response.

We’re structured to support that work from early research through real-world adoption:

Independent by design. We can pursue what's most impactful based on our theory of change and share what we find publicly.

A portfolio approach. Rather than focus on one single direction, we run diverse bets across the safety stack. We take promising ideas from initial experiments to deployment, informed by red-team partnerships with frontier labs and governments.

Serious infrastructure for ambitious research. A dedicated engineering team runs our compute cluster and experiment-scaling stack, so researchers spend their time on research instead of on infra.

Setting the standard. Our events convene key decision makers; our red-team works with frontier developers and governments; and our communications inform the public. Together, this drives adoption and sets the new standard in safety.

Since our founding in July 2022, we've grown to50+ staff, published40+ academic papers, and convened leadingAI safety events. Our work is recognized globally, with publications at premier venues such as NeurIPS, ICML including aBest Paper Honorable Mention in 2026, and ICLR, and features in theFinancial Times,Nature News,Wired Magazine andMIT Technology Review. We conduct pre-deployment testing on behalf of frontier developers such as OpenAI and independent evaluations for governmentsincluding the EU AI Office and publish theAI Security Leaderboard based on our red-teaming expertise. We help steer and grow the AI safety field throughdevelopingresearchroadmaps with renowned researchers such as Yoshua Bengio; runningFAR.Labs, an AI safety-focused co-working space in Berkeley housing 40+ members; and supporting the community throughtargeted grants to technical researchers.

About FAR.Research

We explore promising research directions in AI safety and scale up only those showing a high potential for impact. Once the core research problems are solved, we work to scale them to a minimum viable prototype, demonstrating their validity to AI companies and governments to drive adoption.

We are aiming to rapidly grow our team in the following areas especially, at varying levels of seniority:

• Evals and red-teaming: Conducting pre- and post-release adversarial evaluations of frontier models (e.g.Claude 4 Opus,ChatGPT Agent,GPT-5); developingnovel attacks to support this work; and exploring new threat models (e.g.persuasion,tampering risks).

• Infrastructure:Maintaining GPU compute infrastructure to support experiments with open-weight models and developing new tooling to allow our research teams to scale their fine-tuning and post-training workflows to frontier open-weight models.

We are also seeking more senior candidates in the following research areas:

• Mitigating AI deception: Studying whenlie detectors induce honesty or evasion, and developing model organisms for deception and sandbagging

• Adversarial Robustness: Working to rigorously solve these security problems through building a science of security and robustness for AI, fromdemonstrating superhuman systems can be vulnerable, toscaling laws for robustness andjailbreaking constitutional classifiers

• Mechanistic Interpretability: Findingissueswith Sparse Autoencoders, probing deception usingAmongUs, understandinglearned planning in SokoBan and interpretable data attribution.

FAR.AI is one of the largest independent AI safety research institutes, and is rapidly growing with the goal of diversifying and deepening our research portfolio. We would welcome the opportunity to add new research directions if you are a senior researcher with a strong vision and would like to pitch us on it.

About the Role

We organize our team as Members of Technical Staff, with significant overlap between scientist and engineer roles. As an engineer, you will develop scalable implementations of machine learning algorithms and use them to run scientific experiments. You can contribute to open source codebases such as Pytorch, HuggingFace Transformers and Accelerate. You will receive engineering mentorship via code review, pair programming and regular 1-to-1s. Alongside the scientists, you will be involved in the write-up of results and credited as an author in papers.

You are encouraged to develop your research taste, proposing novel directions and joining a research pod which suits your interests. You are welcome to take time to study and to attend conferences free of charge. Our technical team is organized into research pods to enable continuity of organizational structure whilst each pod can pivot through varied research projects.

BeyondFAR.AI, you can work with national AI safety institutes, frontier model developers and top academics.

About You

It is essential that you:

• Have significant software engineering experience or experience applying machine learning methods. Evidence of this may include prior work experience, open-source contributions, or academic publications.

• Have experience with at least one object-oriented programming language (preferably Python).

• Are results-oriented and motivated by impactful research.

It is preferable that you have experience with some of the following:

• Common ML frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow.

• Natural language processing or reinforcement learning.

• Operating system internals and distributed systems.

• Publications or open-source software contributions.

• Basic linear algebra, calculus, probability, and statistics.

We encourage applications from strong software engineers who are new to ML, and from academics without industrial experience in software engineering.

Benefits*

• 🩺 Health Insurance - 94% of Insurance premium paid by Organization commencing within 1 month after your start date

• 💰 Retirement - 401(k) plan with up to 2% match

• 🏝️ PTO-25 days Paid Time Off per year, accrued weekly and up to 10 days of paid sick leave per year

• 🚼 Paid Leave - Paid Bereavement, Family, Medical and Pregnancy Disability Leave

• 🖥️ WFH Stipend & Equipment- Work computer and stipend provided for eligible employees

• 🍽️ Catered Meals (Berkeley Office Only) - Catered lunches and dinners on workdays at our office

*(Available only to full-time employees located in the US)

Logistics

If based in the USA or Singapore, you will be an employee ofFAR.AI (501(c)(3) research non-profit / non-profit CLG). Outside the USA or Singapore, you will be employed via an EOR organisation on behalf ofFAR.AI or as a contractor.

• Location:Both remote and in-person (Berkeley, CA or Singapore) are possible. We sponsor visas for in-person employees, and can hire remotely in most countries.

• Hours:Full-time (40 hours/week).

• Application process: A 72-minute programming assessment, two interviews with members of our technical staff, and a paid work trial lasting up to 1 week. If you are not available for a work trial we may be able to find alternative ways of testing your fit.

If you have any questions about the role, feel free to contact us attalent@far.ai. Otherwise, if you don't have questions, the best way to ensure a proper review of your skills and qualifications is by applying directly via the application form. Please don't email us to share your resume (it won't have any impact on our decision). Thank you!