Research Engineer

The Center for AI Risk Management & Alignment (CARMA) works to help society navigate the complex and potentially catastrophic risks arising from increasingly powerful AI systems. Our mission is specifically to lower the risks to humanity and the biosphere from transformative AI.

We focus on grounding AI risk management in rigorous analysis, developing policy frameworks that squarely address AGI, advancing technical safety approaches, and fostering global perspectives on durable safety. Through these complementary approaches, CARMA aims to provide critical support to society for managing the outsized risks from advanced AI before they materialize.

CARMA is a fiscally-sponsored project of Social & Environmental Entrepreneurs, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public benefit corporation.

The Alignment of Dynamical Cognitive Systems program seeks a Research Engineer to develop novel AI platforms addressing critical alignment challenges and practical LLM agents. Combining platform development with alignment research, this role requires expertise in agent-based systems and multi-objective optimization. You'll co-design and develop systems supporting safety research, internal tools, and community resources -- creating environments to shape multi-agent dynamics and implement cooperative AI architectures with robust alignment properties. You'll also build technical infrastructure to investigate experimental AI alignment and control approaches while collaborating with researchers to bring theoretical approaches into practice. This position offers the chance to develop foundational technologies essential for promoting safety as AI capabilities rapidly advance.

 

•  Publications (formal or informal) in AI alignment, AI safety, or related research areas
• Experience with dynamic plan recognition and/or activity recognition
• Developed novel multi-agent architectures
• Experience with LLMs and integrating them into agent architectures
• Familiarity with varied multi-objective optimization techniques
• Experience with distributed systems and platform development
• Knowledge of security and encryption methods for multi-party computation
• Understanding of basic game theory and/or social choice theory concepts
• Familiarity with metacognitive systems, metareasoning, or dynamical cognitive approaches
• Experience with contextual pragmatics and/or constraint satisfaction problems
• Demonstrable open source project contributions
• Experience building systems that actively manage trade-offs between competing objectives