Research Engineering Fellow

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 designing AI systems that people can trust. Our mission is to advance humanity's understanding of AI to build safe and powerful AI systems. We believe that deep research breakthroughs are necessary to make this possible.

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 $59M from investors like Menlo, Lightspeed and Anthropic and work with customers including Arc Institute, Mayo Clinic, and Rakuten.

About the role

We are hiring a Research Engineering Fellow who sits at the intersection of applied research, engineering, and product. You’ll work shoulder‑to‑shoulder with Goodfire technical staff to turn interpretability ideas into robust, user‑facing systems. Expect a lot of ownership: scoping problems with stakeholders, building production‑grade services, and iterating quickly based on what users actually need.

This is a small-cohort program with direct mentorship from Members of Technical Staff. We optimize for rate of learning, product impact, and judgment under real constraints. The fellowship is expected to span approximately 3 months.

What you’ll do

• Ship research into production: Take an interpretability method from paper/prototype to a reliable service.
• Own backend systems: Design and implement services, pipelines, and storage for large‑scale interpretability workflows (primarily with PyTorch).
• Build for real users: Understand user workflows and turn experimental techniques into tools people use routinely.
• Leave things better: Create reusable components, benchmarks, and runbooks others rely on.

What you’ll bring

Required experience

• 5+ years of experience in ML infra, product, or backend engineering.
• Comfort working across research and engineering boundaries.
• Expertise in Python, PyTorch or Jax, and distributed systems.
• Comfort moving from idea to prototype and iterating fast on user feedback to get to production
• Clear written and verbal communication; can explain decisions and trade‑offs to technical and non‑technical partners.
• Enthusiasm for making AI systems safer and more interpretable.

Preferred qualifications

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

Our values

Goodfire is looking for individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We are building a team first and foremost.

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.

What we offer

• Competitive compensation aligned with experience and qualifications
• Full coverage of necessary compute and API costs
• Direct mentorship from a Member of Technical Staff
• In some cases, an opportunity to co-author published research

This is a fixed-term fellowship position. While full-time positions are not guaranteed following the fellowship, exceptional performance during the program may indicate future opportunities at Goodfire.

Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to join a vital mission at an important point in its trajectory - we are developing groundbreaking technology with a world-class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity. If you’re excited about doing your life’s work with us, we encourage you to apply - even if you don’t meet every single requirement.

Note: Fellows must have valid U.S. work authorization to participate in the program. We accept candidates on CPT or OPT/STEM OPT who can commit to full-time, in-person work. We do not sponsor new visas as part of standard fellowship admissions. Exceptions may be considered on a case-by-case basis for truly exceptional candidates with unique expertise.