Research Scientist/Engineer (Science of Scheming)

Apollo Research studies and mitigates risks from advanced AI systems, particularly deceptive alignment and scheming. The Research Scientist/Engineer will help develop a science of scheming by studying reinforcement learning dynamics, creating model organisms, developing scalable evaluations, and analyzing the cognition and scaling behavior of frontier AI systems.

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with leading AI developers. We partner with multiple labs, giving you access to a breadth of models that no single AI lab could offer. Through long-term research collaborations, your work directly impacts how the most capable AI systems are built and deployed
• Deeply study the RL dynamics that lead to the emergence of reward-seeking, evaluation awareness or misaligned preferences. Design and train model organisms, and scale your insights to frontier systems
• Work towards “Scaling laws of scheming”. Build the empirical foundations to predict how scheming risks evolve as models scale in capability
• Develop novel and ambitious evaluation techniques that have a chance of scaling to highly evaluation aware models
• Deep dive into AI cognition. Discover patterns in the reasoning processes of frontier AI systems that no one else has ever observed before