Alignment Scientist/Engineer

AE Studio is an LA-based company focused on increasing human agency, primarily by making the imminent AGI future go well. Our team consists of the best developers, data scientists, researchers, and founders. We do all sorts of projects, always of the quality that makes our clients sing our praises. 

We’ve worked with Samsung, Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway, and other large, important entities you’ve probably heard of.  Our work environment is fantastic for aspiring coders, calculators, and entrepreneurs.  Also, we have neither VC, nor PE, nor other acronyms funding us.  We have a weird business model where we sell our work for a profit and use those profits to pay people (I told you it was weird!). We then reinvest those profits into our promising research on AI alignment and our ambitious internal skunkworks projects. We previously sold one of our skunkworks for some number of millions of dollars.

We have made a name for ourselves in cutting-edge brain computer interface (BCI) R&D, and we are making a name for ourselves in our research and policy efforts on AI alignment. We want to optimize for human agency, if you feel similarly, please apply to support our efforts. Data scientists will have the opportunity between client projects to work on important alignment research, with the opportunity to potentially have your research project prioritized if particularly promising.

ABOUT YOU

• Experience with ML or alignment research
• You care about AI alignment, and are optimistic in humanity’s capacity to problem solve and safely navigate accelerating AI capabilities and have an awesome future
• Eager to use AI and automate everything you do
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, startup-like environment
• Proven data science experience–primary or equal contributor, multiple smaller projects, management of stake-holders.
• Experience working with / building / training deep learning-based computer vision or NLP models or LLMs
• Lots of experience with Python
• Experience calling AI models’ APIs via REST or client libraries
• Growth mindset. Excited about learning new things and solving difficult problems
• Demonstrated ability to work independently/autonomously
• Track record for breaking down complex problems into manageable chunks for individual or team execution
• Full-time availability–but if you have cool side projects that increase human agency, we totally want you to keep working on it...we’ll even help!
• Ability to communicate effectively and work exclusively in English and communicate complex technical concepts clearly to a non-technical audience

BONUS POINTS FOR

• Experience with self-managed data science projects - show us your cool side hustles, especially if they increase human agency
• Experienced with software engineering best practices/software development background
• Agile experience (worked with Kanban, Scrum, Extreme Programming)
• JavaScript / Node.js experience
• Experience managing clients and client relationships
• Experience in startups
• Being in LA to work in person from our amazing office

Salary range is from $120K to $220K per year for people based in California. 

Not in the range? That's fine, you can still apply, and our team may fit you in a more senior position that we're not actively hiring right now, but we are growing fast and may have other openings soon.

EQUITY

Working at AE means receiving equity in our client projects and in Skunkworks ventures. The equity is priced at $0 when granted for tax reasons, but AE invests millions into these projects. Equity comes from reduced margins on client work and internal funding. You get a real stake in the things you help build.

The longer you stay, the more value you create and the more equity you receive. If you leave on good terms, you can retain 20% of your equity by staying engaged. If you spin out a Skunkworks venture, you retain 100%.