Founding Research Engineer

Working at Goodfire

Goodfire’s mission is to advance humanity's understanding of AI by examining the inner workings of advanced AI models (or “AI Interpretability”). As an applied research lab, we bridge the gap between theoretical science and practical applications of interpretability.

We’re looking for agentic, mission-driven, kind, and thoughtful people to help us build the future of interpretability. If you believe understanding AI systems is critical for our future, join us!

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation based in San Francisco, and all roles are full time in person.

The role:

We are looking for a Founding Research Engineer to join our team and help develop robust, scalable systems for deploying interpretability techniques on large AI models. You will collaborate closely with our research team to translate novel interpretability methods into production-ready tools and work on scaling our infrastructure to handle increasingly large models and complex use cases.

Core responsibilities:

1. Design and implement scalable, efficient systems for applying interpretability techniques to large language models in production environments
2. Collaborate with our research team to develop robust pipelines for extracting, processing, and visualizing the internal representations and decision-making processes of AI models
3. Optimize and parallelize interpretability algorithms to handle increasingly large and complex models
4. Build and maintain the infrastructure for training, deploying, and monitoring interpretability-enabled AI models
5. Work closely with our product team to ensure seamless integration of interpretability features into our core product

Who you are:

Goodfire is looking for experienced individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We care deeply about building a team who shares our values:

• High agency: You are self-directed, proactive, and take ownership of your work, setting and accomplishing ambitious goals independently while collaborating effectively with others.
• Constant improvement: You have deep intellectual curiosity and are always seeking to expand your knowledge and reflect on what you could be doing better.
• Strong opinions, loosely held: You foster an environment where well-intentioned disagreement leads to reaching the best solutions. You argue strongly for what you believe and are not afraid to change your mind when you are wrong.
• Deeply mission driven: You understand that the path to building a game-changing interpretability product will not be easy and are prepared to put in the hard work every day. You put the team before yourself and are fully committed to advancing our understanding of AI.
• Thoughtful and pragmatic: You approach your work and interactions with others with nuance and humility. You think deeply about all angles of a problem, not just the one you advocate for. You operate with the understanding that not everything can be perfect.

If you share our values and have at least five years of relevant experience, we encourage you to apply and join us in shaping the future of how we design AI systems.

What we are looking for:

• At least 5 years of experience in research engineering, machine learning engineering or a related field
• Expertise in Python and deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Experience with scaling and deploying large-scale machine learning models in production environments
• Familiarity with distributed computing frameworks and cloud platforms
• Experience writing scalable, well-designed, software
• Passion for AI interpretability and a commitment to responsible AI development

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment
• Experience with interpretability techniques and tooling for AI models
• Experience working with open source AI models
• Contributions to open-source ML projects or libraries

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits. More importantly, you'll have the opportunity to work on groundbreaking technology with a world-class team dedicated to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity.

This role reports to our CTO.