Introduction

The Center for AI Safety (CAIS) is a leading research and field-building organization on a mission to reduce societal-scale risks from AI. Alongside our sister organization, the CAIS Action Fund, we tackle the toughest AI issues with a mix of technical, societal and policy solutions. Our work includes publishing a global statement on AI Risk signed by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and CEOs from the major AI labs, leading the charge on a major AI safety bill, and running a large compute cluster for global academic researchers working on AI safety research.

As a research engineer intern here, you will work very closely with our researchers on projects in fields such as Trojans, Adversarial Robustness, Power Aversion, Machine Ethics, and Out-of-Distribution Detection. We will assign you a dedicated mentor throughout your internship, but we will ultimately be treating you as a colleague. By this we mean, you will have the opportunity to debate for your own experiments or projects, and defend their impact. You will plan and run experiments, conduct code reviews, and work in a small team to create a publication with outsized impact. You will leverage our internal compute cluster to run experiments at scale on large language models.

Timing

This application is for the full-time summer internship position. Applications are due by December 5, 2025.

You might be a good fit if you

Are able to read an ML paper, understand the key result, and understand how it fits into the broader literature.
Are comfortable setting up, launching, and debugging ML experiments.
Are familiar with relevant frameworks and libraries (e.g., pytorch).
Communicate clearly and promptly with teammates.
Take ownership of your individual part in a project.
Have co-authored a ML paper in a top conference.

$9,000 - $19,200 one-time

This internship is unpaid; however, CAIS provides the above stipend to assist with academic pursuits and living expenses. The stipend is subject to tax.

The Center for AI Safety is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, medical condition, marital status, military or veteran status, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. In alignment with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records for employment.

If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact contact@safe.ai.

We value diversity and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.

Research Engineer Intern (Summer 2026)

Job Type