AI Safety Residency — Scale Labs Preparedness & Policy (SLPreP)

About the Program

The Human Frontier Collective (HFC) brings researchers and scientists together to tackle consequential problems in AI. In partnership with the Preparedness and Policy research team, we are building a small cohort of researchers to work on the empirical foundations of AI safety.

The work includes thinking about various failure modes, evaluating whether safety controls hold up under pressure in realistic settings, and studying how AI agents (mis-)behave over long-horizon tasks. Residents take open research questions like these and turn them into work that improves how frontier AI systems are evaluated and safeguarded.

Research Areas

Mentors will guide AI safety residents on projects in AI safety research areas, such as:

• AI control and chain-of-thought monitoring: Developing techniques to oversee and constrain AI systems, including monitoring their reasoning to detect harmful intent or deception.
• Alignment red-teaming: Developing science around testing whether models have hidden goals, misaligned behaviors or unsafe tendencies.
• Multi-agent safety: Studying the risks that emerge when multiple agents interact, such as collusion, coordinated failures, or unexpected collective behavior.
• Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) safety: Investigating how to keep AI systems safe and aligned as AIs increasingly contribute to their own development.
• Science of Evaluations: Examining when and how models recognize they're being tested, and how situational awareness affects the reliability/validity of evaluations.
• Misuse risks: Developing methods to assess how AI systems could be exploited by malicious actors, including evaluating their potential to enable harmful activities.

Projects are matched to demonstrated expertise; we don’t expect any candidate to cover every area.

Representative Research

• ASPI: A benchmark with task–attack scenarios testing how clarification-seeking changes prompt-injection vulnerability in LLM agents.
• PropensityBench: evaluating whether language models choose harmful actions when given simulated dangerous tools under various operational pressures
• BioRiskEval: evaluating whether safeguards for open-weight bio-foundation models remain robust under fine-tuning and probing.
• RSI Control: evaluating whether frontier models can covertly sabotage R&D efforts in the RSI loop.

See more work from the Human Frontier Collective.

What You'll Do

Projects are mentor-guided. Each resident will be given a list of research proposals and match you with one based on your research interests and background. You’ll meet weekly with a researcher from SLPreP who sets the direction and gives feedback, and you will drive the day-to-day work. By default, the project is expected to result in a conference paper.

• Own research end to end: Turn a high-level safety question into hypotheses, baselines, and controlled experiments, and produce work that others can inspect and build on.
• Build the measurement: Implement and debug evaluation harnesses, agent environments, datasets, monitoring methods, or post-training experiments.
• Exercise research judgment: Identify confounds, separate what a model can do from what it tends to do, make sense of negative results, and decide what to try next without step-by-step direction.
• Make the work legible: Produce reproducible code, experiment logs, analysis, and precise technical writing. External outputs, where appropriate, remain subject to research, security, and communications review. Outputs also include research papers, which will be submitted to top ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR).

Who We're Looking For

You may be a good fit if you:

• are motivated by ensuring the safe and responsible development of advanced AI systems;
• are interested in technical safety research, such as alignment evaluations, AI control, monitoring, multi-agent safety, or open-weight model safety;
• are pursuing or have completed a PhD in CS, ML, statistics, mathematics, or a related field (we also encourage researchers with an equivalent track record to apply!);
• can make progress with high-level guidance, including implementing, debugging, getting unstuck, interpreting results, and proposing next experiments;
• communicate research clearly and handle confidential information and internal resources responsibly.

Application Process

• Apply: Submit your resume or CV, your Google Scholar profile (if you have one), and one research project you substantially owned, with 2–3 sentences on your contribution.
• ML research take-home: You’ll receive a high-level research question and turn it into something testable: form hypotheses, design and run small-scale experiments, and write up what you found and what it tells us. We care more about your reasoning and how you interpret results than about polished or conclusive outcomes.
• Research discussion (30 min): We’ll have an open-ended discussion about key questions in AI safety. We’re interested in how you reason about the problems and what directions you find promising.
• 15-minute hiring manager chat.

About the Role

• Location: Remote within the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.
• Hours: 20 hours per week
• Term: 3 months, with the option to extend to 6–12 months for exceptional candidates (part-time Internship structure)
• Compensation: $100/hour
• Recognition: authorship opportunities and engagement with industry research leadership across Scale's ecosystem of collaboration (major labs, government, enterprise).

PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.

About Us:

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.

We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status. 

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at [email protected]. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.

We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision*.* 

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