Research Scientist - [Seed Model - Alignment & Preparedness]
ByteDance, San Jose, California
About the job
Seed Model–Alignment & Preparedness is dedicated to advancing AI safety alongside frontier model capabilities. Backed by sustained investment and substantial compute resources, we tackle fundamental challenges in alignment, safety evaluation, and preparedness for emerging risks—translating research into safe, reliable AI systems that benefit people.
We’re looking for researchers to make frontier models and agents safer, with a strong focus on agent RL: training agents that stay safe and controllable in tool use, code execution, and long-horizon tasks.
Responsibilities
- Agent RL & safety training: Use RL, SFT, and preference optimization to train agents safely. Design environments, rewards, and training data that reduce deception, reward hacking, and unauthorized actions, and teach agents to check authorization, recognize risks, and stop when needed, without sacrificing useful autonomy. Ensure safety generalizes to new tasks and holds up through further training.
- Frontier risk assessment: Partner with domain experts to evaluate dangerous capabilities (e.g., CBRN, cybersecurity), model threats, and build safeguards. Provide empirical evidence to guide development and deployment decisions.