Apolloresearch4mo ago

Backend Software Engineer (Research team)

London · (london) · LondonFull-timemid

OtherBackend EngineeringSoftware EngineerBackend Software EngineerSoftware Engineering

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Quick Summary

Overview

Application deadline: We are conducting interviews actively and aim to fill this role as soon as we find someone suitable.

Technical Tools

OtherBackend EngineeringSoftware EngineerBackend Software EngineerSoftware Engineering

Application deadline: We are conducting interviews actively and aim to fill this role as soon as we find someone suitable.

ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY

We’re looking for Backend Software Engineers who are excited to build tools for frontier AGI safety research, e.g. building and maintaining evals libraries and tools for monitoring and controlling our own LLM traffic.

REPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS

Here is a list of example projects which you might build and ship in your first 6 months.

- Internal tooling for efficiently running and analyzing evaluations. For example, a tool that quickly investigates thousands of agentic eval runs in parallel and surfaces interesting information automatically

- Automated evaluation pipelines to minimize the time from getting access to a new model for pre-deployment testing to analyzing the most important results and sharing them

- Orchestration tools that allow researchers to run thousands of agentic evaluations in parallel on remote machines with high security and reliability

- LLM proxy service that enables us to monitor all of our coding agent traffic in real time and identify undesired behavior automatically (in the spirit of Control)

- LLM agents and MCP tools to automate internal software engineering and research tasks, with sandboxes to prevent major failures

- CI pipeline optimisations to reduce execution time and eliminate flaky tests

- Telemetry API and instrumentation of our existing tools, allowing us to monitor usage and improve reliability

- Data warehousing pipeline and service to store thousands of eval transcripts which researchers can study and build datasets from

- Upstream improvements to the Inspect framework and ecosystem, e.g. support for evaluating modern agentic scaffolds.

Rapidly prototype and iterate on internal tools and libraries for building and running frontier language model evaluations

Lead the development of major features from ideation to implementation

Collaboratively define and shape the software roadmap and priorities

Establish and advocate for good software design practices, codebase health, and coding agent practices

Work closely with researchers to understand what challenges they face

Assist researchers with implementation and debugging of research code

Communicate clearly about technical decisions and tradeoffs

You must have experience writing production-quality python code

We value candidates from diverse backgrounds and recognise that candidates may demonstrate their skills in different ways.

For example, we might be impressed if you have:

Led the development of a successful software tool or product over an extended period (e.g. 1 year or more)

Started and built the tech stack for a company, e.g in a start-up

Worked your way up in a large organisation, repeatedly gaining more responsibility and influencing a large part of the codebase

Authored and/or maintained a popular open-source tool or library

Placed in a prestigious programming competition (IOI, ICPC, etc.)

5+ years of professional software engineering experience

The following would be a bonus:

Experience working with LLM agents or LLM evaluations

Infosecurity / cybersecurity experience

Experience working with AWS

Interest in AI Safety

We want to emphasize that people who feel they don’t fulfill all of these characteristics but think they would be a good fit for the position nonetheless are strongly encouraged to apply. We believe that excellent candidates can come from a variety of backgrounds and are excited to give you opportunities to shine.

Time Allocation: Full-time

Location: This is an in-person role working out of our London or San Francisco office.

Visa sponsorship: We sponsor visas in both the UK and US. Sponsorship isn't guaranteed for every role or candidate, but if we make you an offer, we'll work with you to find the right visa route.

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.

Salary: 100k - 200k GBP (~135k - 270k USD)

Flexible work hours and schedule

Unlimited vacation

Unlimited sick leave

Up to 6 months of paid parental leave

Comprehensive health, dental and vision insurance

Retirement savings with competitive employer matching (e.g. 401(k) for US employees)

Lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays

Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences

A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budge