About Center for AI Safety
What is Center for AI Safety?
The Center for AI Safety (CAIS — pronounced "case") is "a San Francisco-based research and field-building nonprofit" focused on mitigating societal-scale risks from AI. The organisation believes that "artificial intelligence has the potential to profoundly benefit the world, provided that we can develop and use it safely," and its mission is to "reduce societal-scale risks associated with AI by conducting safety research, building the field of AI safety researchers, and advocating for safety standards." CAIS works alongside its DC-based sister organisation, the Center for AI Safety Action Fund.
CAIS is led by Director Dan Hendrycks ("PhD Computer Science, UC Berkeley"), who frames the work as multidisciplinary: "Preventing extreme risks from AI requires more than just technical work, so CAIS takes a multidisciplinary approach." Its impact to date includes a Global Statement on AI Risk signed by 600 leading AI researchers and public figures, 170 AI safety research papers, and a compute cluster supporting 100 AI safety researchers.
Where will I work?
CAIS is headquartered in San Francisco, and its open roles are based there. The organisation runs its own compute cluster — "we offer researchers free access to our compute cluster, which can run and train large-scale AI systems" — and provides lunch and dinner at the office, signalling a co-located, in-person research culture.
What is the Center for AI Safety team like?
CAIS combines technical research, field-building and advocacy. As a research scientist, you would "design and run experiments on large language models, build the tooling needed to train and evaluate models at scale, and turn results into publishable research" — work that "spans areas like AI honesty, robustness, transparency, and trojan/backdoor behaviors." On the field-building side, CAIS runs multidisciplinary fellowships — including the AI and Society Fellowship and a Philosophy Fellowship — plus the "AI Safety, Ethics, & Society" course, training "1000+ future AI safety leaders." Open roles span research scientists and engineers, program and operations managers, a Director of Development, and chief-of-staff and special-projects roles — a small, mission-driven team working with "some of the top talent working on technical and conceptual research in AI safety."
Work-Life Balance
CAIS supports its team with Unlimited PTO, listed directly in its benefits. The organisation pairs that with an annual professional-development stipend and the day-to-day support of lunch and dinner provided at the office — practical perks that let a mission-focused team concentrate on hard, high-stakes research.
Perks and Benefits
- Unlimited PTO
- Health insurance for you and your dependents
- 401(k) plan with 4% matching
- Annual Professional Development Stipend
- Lunch and dinner at the office
- $1,500 referral bonus (after a referral stays 90 days)
- Access to top AI-safety talent and a dedicated compute cluster