Member of Technical Staff, Research

 

 

 

 

METR currently has 3 primary research streams:

• Capabilities: Accurately measuring frontier model performance on threat-relevant tasks (autonomy, AI R&D automation, etc.) and predicting future capabilities. We develop and maintain benchmarks, diverse evidence-gathering methods, and metrics to track capability trends and anticipate the thresholds that matter most for safety.
• Monitorability: Understanding how well frontier models can take subversive or unwanted actions despite various monitoring or control protocols. We build the research infrastructure – novel metrics, control evaluations, elicitation methods – needed to improve the world's understanding of how effectively current and future models can circumvent oversight.
• Alignment/Propensity: Determining whether or not a model that is capable of causing catastrophic harm (in its actual deployment setting) would be likely to actually do so in a given high-stakes deployment setting. We aim to develop the science of propensity evaluations and examine when we might expect high-stakes catastrophic misalignment.
• Evaluation Execution: Productionizing, improving, and executing our various evaluations. We streamline our processes and build common infrastructure to scale our ability to continually run our most up-to-date evaluations on the latest models.

The Capabilities and Monitorability streams are both hiring Research ICs (individual contributors), while the Alignment/Propensity and Evaluation Execution streams are is hiring for a Research Stream Lead, followed by Research ICs down the line. The stream you end up joining will be based on a combination of working fit and interest.

 

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.

You can set a compelling and coherent research agenda for a team - you translate high-level goals into tractable projects that serve METR's mission.

You have experience hiring and developing researchers; you have good judgment about what makes someone excellent, and you actively invest in the growth of your team members.

You can hold a team to high standards while being comfortable with fast-moving/scrappy research workflows - you know when to push for rigor and when to ship, and you help others develop this judgment too.

You are an effective technical manager - you can meaningfully evaluate the work of researchers across a range of subproblems, give useful feedback, and catch things going wrong early.

You communicate clearly with leadership and stakeholders - you surface the right information, flag risks proactively, and represent your team's work effectively.