Research Scientist (Field)

About Goodfire

Behind our name: Like fire, AI holds the potential for both devastating harm and immense benefit. Just as our ancestors' mastery of fire enabled them to cook food, smelt metals, and launch rockets into space, AI stands as humanity's most profound innovation since that first controlled flame. Our goal is to tame this new fire, enabling a safe transition into a post-AGI world.

Goodfire is an AI interpretability research lab focused on understanding and intentionally designing advanced AI systems. We believe that advances in interpretability will unlock the next frontier of safe and powerful foundation models.

Our flagship product is Ember - the universal platform for neural programming. Ember decodes the neurons of an AI model to give direct, programmable access to its internal representations. By moving beyond black-box inputs and outputs, Ember unlocks entirely new ways to apply, train, and align AI models — allowing users to discover new knowledge hidden in their model, precisely shape its behaviors, and improve its performance.

We’re backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, NFDG’s AI Grant, South Park Commons, Work-Bench, and other leading investors.

Working at Goodfire

Our team brings together AI interpretability experts and experienced startup operators from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind, united by the belief that interpretability is essential to advancing AI development.

We're a public benefit corporation based in San Francisco. All roles are in-person, five days a week, at our Telegraph Hill office.

The role:

We are looking for a Research Scientist to join our team and help develop robust, scalable systems for deploying interpretability techniques on large AI models. You will collaborate closely with our Foundational 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. Conduct impactful research in the fields of mechanistic interpretability and model editing.
2. Develop novel techniques and algorithms for extracting, analyzing, visualizing, and manipulating the internal representations and decision-making processes of large AI models
3. Design and implement scalable, robust systems for applying interpretability and model design techniques at scale
4. Perform novel research on a frontier AI models across a variety of modalities, such as language, image, and genomics models
5. Stay up-to-date with the latest developments in AI interpretability and model editing research, and contribute to the broader scientific community through open-source projects and community initiatives
6. Report on important field learned scientific insights and advancements to our Foundational Team

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:

Put mission and team first
All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.

Improve constantly
We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.

Take ownership and initiative
There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we’re building.

Action today
We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.

 

If you share our values and have at least two 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:

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Demonstrated research intuition for interpretability and model editing research
• Solid engineering skills, with proficiency in Python and experience with PyTorch or similar deep learning frameworks
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product and engineering
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex research ideas to diverse audiences
• Passion for AI interpretability and a commitment to responsible AI development

Preferred qualifications:

• Postdoctoral experience or industry research experience in interpretability
• Experience working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup environment
• Experience leading research projects and mentoring junior researchers
• Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects or research codebases

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 on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity.

The expected salary range for this position is $200,000 - $400,000 USD.

This role reports to our CTO.