🏗 Research Lead

We are a nonprofit raising policymaker awareness about AI risks, aiming to slow potentially dangerous research and accelerate technical safety. We have ambitious goals and need to move fast. Come work with us! → About Palisade

As Research Lead, you will coordinate a team of research generalists and do hands-on engineering. Your day will include guiding the team's research direction, mentoring researchers, writing code and representing the team's work to stakeholders. The ideal candidate blends the skills of startup CTO with the technical depth of a senior scientist.

What you'll do

1. Leadership
   • Lead a team of LLM researchers, providing technical guidance and mentorship
   • Review and refine experiment designs proposed by team members
   • Ensure research quality and reproducibility across projects
2. Execution
   • Identify high-impact research opportunities from our backlog or propose novel directions
   • Design experiments to test hypotheses about frontier AI risks
   • Own a project end-to-end from conception to publication
3. Communication
   • Present findings to technical and non-technical audiences
   • Write papers, tweets, blog posts
   • Liaison with collaborators like RAND, the AISIs, other safety orgs

Our collaboration process

• We post daily statuses for each other to keep in sync regarding our directions. Each project has a daily sync, and there’s a weekly lab demo to show off our results.
• We propose new ideas or directions by writing up a doc, sharing it, and getting comments. This enables async communication.
• Our median response time to each other is in hours, not minutes; we work in an independent and self-directed fashion. Your supervisor helps you maintain direction; colleagues help with the implementation; you keep track of your tasks and milestones.
• We offer high intellectual freedom and value curiosity. You are welcome to challenge anything we do.

What you'll need

Experience level

• 6+ years of relevant technical experience
• Proven track record of leading complex engineering projects to completion
• Demonstrated success in leadership in engineering or research teams

Core skills

• Technical Leadership: Ability to guide technical direction while empowering team members
• Research Excellence: Deep understanding of LLM capabilities, limitations, and evaluation methodologies
• Strategic Vision: Capacity to identify high-value research directions in a rapidly evolving field
• Python Mastery: Expert-level programming skills to lead by example and review team code
• Advanced LLM Engineering: Prompting, scaffolding, CoT/ToT, RAG, tool calling, and agent design
• Team Management: Experience balancing team autonomy with alignment toward research goals
• Empirical Mindset: Commitment to data-driven research with rapid experimentation cycles
• Communication Mastery: Exceptional writing and presentation skills for both technical and nontechnical audiences
• C1+ English proficiency

Additional skills

This is a bucket list of relevant skills. It is not necessary to master all of them to work with us.

• Research Planning: Ability to structure complex research programs with clear milestones
• Familiarity with AI Safety evaluations: recent work by Anthropic, Apollo, METR
• LLM red-teaming: adversarial prompting, including bypassing limitations, jailbreaking, and robustness testing
• Reproducible Science: Experience doing experiments designed to work on others’ machines
• Cross-functional Leadership: Skill in collaborating across engineering, policy, and communications teams

Hiring process

1. Application
2. Intro call introducing the role and the company and discussing your background
3. Interview with a team lead
4. Paid trial day
5. Paid trial period, 1–2 weeks

Compensation and benefits

• Compensation: market rate for your country of work authorization, capped at Netherlands. See Research Generalist salary bands for certain countries for precomputed bands for some countries. Please note that we cannot transact with countries under U.S. sanctions.
• Comprehensive global health and dental insurance
• Coworking space stipend
• Partial fitness compensation