Research Engineer

About Goodfire

Behind our name: Like fire, AI holds the potential for both immense benefit and significant risk. Just as mastering fire transformed human history, we believe the safe and intentional development of AI will shape the future of our species. Our goal is to tame this new fire.

Goodfire is an AI interpretability research company focused on understanding and intentionally designing advanced AI systems. We believe advances in interpretability will unlock the next frontier of safe and powerful foundation models and that deep research breakthroughs are necessary to make this possible.

Everything we do is in service of that mission. We move fast, take ownership, and constantly push to improve. We believe in acting today rather than tomorrow. We care deeply about the success of the organization and put the team above ourselves.

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco with a team of the world’s top interpretability researchers and engineers from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind. We’ve raised $57M from investors like Menlo, Lightspeed and Anthropic and work with customers including Arc Institute, Mayo Clinic, and Rakuten.

The role:

We’re looking for a Research Engineer to help build the systems that power cutting-edge interpretability research. You’ll play a central role in scaling and deploying tools that analyze and steer large models.

Where you might contribute:

• Interpretability mechanisms – Build tools and infra to support foundational model probing.
• Moonshots – Rapidly prototype novel interpretability systems with high-upside potential.
• Applied research & usability – Turn interpretability techniques into robust, usable features.

We’ll work with you to determine the pod that best aligns with your strengths.

Core responsibilities:

• Develop robust tooling for analyzing and visualizing model internals.
• Optimize pipelines and infra for large-scale interpretability workflows.
• Partner with researchers to iterate quickly on experimental techniques.
• Help deploy interpretability tools into product and production contexts.
• Ensure system reliability, reproducibility, and performance.

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’re looking for:

• 5+ years of experience in ML infra, research engineering, or systems programming.
• Comfort working across research and engineering boundaries.
• Expertise in Python, PyTorch or Jax, and distributed systems.
• Experience deploying and maintaining ML systems at scale.
• Enthusiasm for helping AI systems become safer and more interpretable.

Preferred qualifications:

• Prior work on model internals, explainability, or interpretability.
• Open-source ML infra contributions.
• Startup or lab experience in fast-moving teams.

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 $180,000 - $350,000 USD.