Senior Research Engineer, Alignment

At DeepMind, we value diversity of experience, knowledge, backgrounds and perspectives and harness these qualities to create extraordinary impact. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, please do not hesitate to let us know.

Snapshot

Building novel technology comes with the responsibility to build mechanisms for safe and reliable development and deployment at every step. The Alignment team is one of several at DeepMind working to ensure safe development of AGI. Our team has a particular focus on understanding models, and failures of intent alignment, cases in which an AI system knowingly acts against the wishes of its designers. We collaborate with many other teams at DeepMind to mitigate broader risks, and benefit from a range of directions and perspectives. As a Research Engineer, you will design, implement, and empirically validate algorithms in order to mitigate long-term risks.

About us

Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority.

We’ve built a supportive and inclusive environment where collaboration is encouraged and learning is shared freely. We don’t set limits based on what others think is possible or impossible. We drive ourselves and inspire each other to push boundaries and achieve ambitious goals.

We constantly iterate on our workplace experience with the goal of ensuring it encourages a balanced life. From excellent office facilities through to extensive manager support, we strive to support our people and their needs as effectively as possible.

Competitive salary applies. Our list of benefits is extensive, and we’re happy to discuss this further throughout the interview process.

The role

Alignment Research Engineers at DeepMind work directly on a wide range of conceptual, theoretical and empirical research projects. You will apply your engineering and research skills to accelerate our research. Typical day-to-day activities include developing prototypes, proposing algorithms, designing experiments, running and scaling up experiments, overcoming technical obstacles, and analysing results.

Key responsibilities

• Collaborate on projects to assess and/or mitigate failure modes
• Contribute to the team’s broader agenda on alignment mechanisms 
• Communicate ideas and findings, potentially with other internal or external teams

About you

In order to set you up for success as a Research Engineer at DeepMind, we look for the following skills and experience: 

• Bachelor's degree in a technical subject (e.g. machine learning, AI, computer science, mathematics, physics, statistics), or equivalent experience.
• Practical experience writing and running machine learning experiments
• Background knowledge of mathematics and machine learning concepts needed to understand research papers in the field.
• Ability to communicate technical ideas effectively
• A strong motivation to mitigate current and future risks of AI systems

In addition, the following would be an advantage: 

• Machine learning and research experience in industry, academia or personal projects.
• Experience or interest in mentoring or managing other engineers
• Familiarity with distributed scientific computation, whether CPU, GPU, TPU, or heterogenous.
• Experience or familiarity with existing research on AGI safety.