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About METR
We are a nonprofit research organization that develops scientific methods to assess AI capabilities, risks and mitigations, with a specific focus on threats related to autonomy, AI R&D automation, and alignment. Our work advances the science of AI measurement by understanding frontier AI systems' ability to complete complex tasks without human input, and directly executing those measurements to inform risk assessments and consensus within the AI industry, among policymakers, and the public.
Our work has been cited by NIST, a previous US President, the UK Government, Nature, The New York Times, and Time Magazine. Through our work with leading AI labs, governments, and academia, we ensure that our insights can quickly be leveraged to promote the safe development of increasingly powerful AI systems. We believe it is robustly good for civilization to have a clear understanding of what types of danger AI systems pose and how high the risk is, and we are extremely excited to find ambitious, excellent people to join our team and tackle one of the most important challenges of our time.
What We're Looking For
We’re looking for a combination of skills across “research science”, “research execution” and software engineering. You may not have all of these skills (for example, we don’t expect software engineering to be a large part of the role for narrowly focused researchers)
Research Science
- You have strong knowledge of relevant literature and general research good practice.
- You have good understanding of how particular projects fit into METR's overall mission - you are thinking about things like "how will this generalize to future models", or "how does this relate to alignment evals".
- You reliably notice important but subtle methodological limitations.
- You are undaunted by open-ended mandates - you can take a confusing or ill-posed question and produce insightful and helpful frameworks / proposals / results.
- You can write great papers.
Research execution
- You are an experienced executor/contributor; you are familiar with patterns of successful and unsuccessful execution in frontier ML research. You are undaunted by "I've never done this before" or even "no-one has done this before".
- Your total output is "team-sized" - you manage multiple people or run a project or are several times more productive as an IC than core staff.
- You are creative, ambitious and entrepreneurial. You work fast and are highly responsive and available. You can juggle many balls when it is useful.
Software Engineering
- You balance rapid prototyping with the creation of maintainable, scalable systems and make sound technical decisions.
- You lead large projects from ideation to delivery, balancing innovative ML solutions with reliable, high-quality code.
- You set high standards for system architecture, code quality, and maintainability, influencing broad software practices across the organization.
