Research Scientist - AI Safety & Alignment in San Mateo

Job Description

Kadence is hiring for a Research Scientist to join a well-funded, independent AI research organization working on some of the most important unanswered questions around the safety and reliability of increasingly capable AI systems.

Location: SF Bay or Remote

Compensation: $200k - $900k depending on experience and location

Company

• Well-funded independent research organization focused on making advanced AI systems safer and more reliable.
• Combines theoretical research with practical experiments on current frontier models.
• Developing AI-assisted research workflows that can generate, test and verify new ideas faster.
• Uses leading proprietary and open-weight models rather than building a foundation model from scratch.
• Building internal tooling around automated experimentation, model evaluation and proof verification.
• Offers serious compute, ambitious research problems and greater independence than a commercial AI lab.

Role

• Own original research into AI alignment, oversight, learning or model behaviour.
• Turn broad safety problems into precise theoretical or empirical projects.
• Run experiments using frontier models, targeted post-training and reinforcement learning.
• Develop proofs, evaluations or techniques for understanding when alignment methods may fail.
• Use AI agents and automated research tools to accelerate experiments and mathematical work.
• Best suited to an independent researcher with strong ML, mathematics or theoretical computer-science depth.