Senior/ Principal Research Scientist, AI Safety, Biological/ Physical Sciences

Your Impact at LILA

We're building a talent-dense, high-agency AI safety team at Lila that will engage all core teams within the organization (science, model training, lab integration, etc.), to prepare for risks from scientific superintelligence. The initial focus of this team will be to build and implement a bespoke safety strategy for Lila, tailored to its specific goals and deployment strategies. This will involve technical safety strategy development, broader ecosystem engagement, as well as developing technical collateral including risk- and capability-focused evaluations and safeguards.

What You'll Be Building

• Set the build and research strategy for Lila’s safety approach to biological / physical risks.
• Design and build capability evaluations to test for scientific risks (both known but especially novel) from cutting edge scientific models integrated with automated physical labs, across biological / physical sciences.
• Coordinate and lead threat modelling exercises with internal and external scientific experts, including monitoring for emerging technologies and use-cases.
• Develop and curate high-quality training and test data for evals and safety systems.
• Evaluate risks from Lila’s capabilities, including through interactions with the wider ecosystem of capabilities (e.g. general-purpose frontier models as well as narrow scientific tools)
• Contributing to broader, high-quality research efforts - as and when needed - for scientific capability evaluation and restriction.
• Contribute to external communications on Lila’s safety efforts.

What You’ll Need to Succeed

• A PhD in either a biological sciences domain (e.g., molecular biology, virology, computational biology or related fields) or a physical sciences domain (materials sciences, physics, chemistry, chemical or nuclear engineering, or related fields), or other related experience.
• Demonstrated ability to set research directions for open problems in dual-use risks in the biological / physical sciences.
• Experience in scientific computing, across either biological or physical sciences.
• Familiarity with dual-use research and dissemination concerns, across the relevant safety / regulatory / governance frameworks (e.g. export control frameworks, biological and chemical-related conventions and controls).
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and concerns to non-expert audiences effectively.
• Demonstrated ability to lead teams of internal and external collaborators in buildout of Lila’s point-of-view on biological / physical risks
• Demonstrated ability to deal with cross-functional stakeholders (science, AI, product, policy) in a complex environment.

Bonus Points For

• Experience in developing or applying ML to biological or physical sciences
• Experience in building evaluations, or conducting red-teaming exercises, across scientific risks for frontier models / narrow scientific tools.

• This position may be based in any of Lila's offices, including Cambridge (MA), San Francisco (CA), or London (UK).