Research Scientist, Takeoff Intel

Details

About the role

We're looking for a Research Scientist who has done hands-on research on large models (pretraining, fine-tuning, RL, evals, or agents scaffolds) and wants to focus on measuring and understanding recursive-self-improvement. You know what the model-development loop looks like from the inside: which signals matter and where the real bottlenecks are. On this team you'll use that judgment to decide what's worth measuring, design the evaluations and models that measure it, and interpret what the results mean for how fast this is moving.

We're hiring at both junior and senior levels. Senior researchers should be comfortable doing hands-on technical work alongside setting research direction.

Responsibilities

• Identify the signals that track AI R&D acceleration and design the evaluations that measure them
• Build quantitative models of capability growth and self-improvement dynamics, grounded in evaluation and telemetry data
• Run experiments and evals to test hypotheses about automation and capability
• Make opinionated research bets and own the outcome
• Write graded assessments of what our measurements show, for internal decision-makers and public reporting
• Collaborate with pretraining, RL, economic research, and policy teams

Requirements

You may be a good fit if you

• Have done hands-on research on large language models: pretraining, fine-tuning, RL, evals, or agent systems
• Have strong quantitative instincts, are comfortable with quantitative modeling and reasoning
• Have experience in forecasting, may have published AI forecasting scenarios
• Can design an evaluation from a vague question and defend the methodology
• Write clearly and calibrate: state confidence, name what would change your conclusion
• Are motivated by impact: comfortable with work whose output is graded assessments and system-card sections more often than papers
• Care about AI safety and think carefully about where rapid capability growth leads

Strong candidates may also have

• Trained or RL'd frontier models hands-on
• Experience with scaling laws, capability forecasting, or emergent-capability studies
• A physics, applied-math, or similarly quantitative background that moved into ML
• Written a system card section, capability report, or methodology document that others cite
• Experience supervising and correcting AI-written code

Logistics

• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
• Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.
• Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

Compensation

Annual Salary:

• $350,000 - $850,000 USD