Aether

Position Details

• Openings: 1-2 researchers
• Start Date: Between February and May 2026
• Duration: Through end of 2026, with possibility of extension
• Compensation: ~$100k USD/year (prorated based on start date)
• Apply by: Saturday, January 17th EOD AoE (extended from original deadline of January 3rd)
• Location: Trajectory Labs, Toronto (in-person expected, visa sponsorship available)

What you'd be working on

So far, we have focused on chain-of-thought monitoring. See our Research section for details on our work, including our paper How does information access affect LLM monitors' ability to detect sabotage? and our post Hidden Reasoning in LLMs: A Taxonomy.

We are not committed to a specific research agenda for the upcoming year yet. Topics we're currently exploring include shaping the generalization of LLM personas, interpretable continual learning, and pretraining data filtering. We plan to always work on whatever seems most impactful to us.

We're looking for:

• Experience working with LLMs and executing empirical ML research projects
• Agency and general intelligence
• Strong motivation and clear thinking about AI safety
• Good written and verbal communication

A great hire could help us:

• Become a more established org, like Apollo or Redwood
• Identify and push on relevant levers to positively influence AGI companies, governments, and the AI safety field
• Shape a research agenda and focus on more impactful projects
• Accelerate our experiment velocity and develop a fast-paced, effective research engineering culture
• Publish more papers in top conferences

Application Process

We prefer that candidates join us for a short-term collaboration (1-3 months part-time) to establish mutual fit before transitioning to a long-term position. However, if you have AI safety experience equivalent to having completed the MATS extension, we are happy to interview you for a long-term position directly. The interview process will involve at least two interviews: a coding interview and a conceptual interview where we'll discuss your research interests. The expected starting date for long-term researchers is Feb-May; we're happy to start short-term collaborations ASAP.

If you are only interested in short-term collaborations, you can fill out this form instead.