Research Engineer, Conjecture
Engineering Focus
£85-210k
4-5 days a week in office
Transparent & safe AI
Job no longer available
Transparent & safe AI
1-20 employees
Job no longer available
£85-210k
4-5 days a week in office
1-20 employees
Company mission
Conjecture's mission is to make sure future AI systems are interpretable, controllable, and produce good outcomes.
Role
Who you are
- Large scale distributed computing + machine learning systems
- Large models that need to be parallelized to fit in memory (think tensor / data / pipeline parallelism or surrounding techniques) including frameworks such as Deepspeed
- Deep expertise with machine learning frameworks (PyTorch, Jax etc)
- Academic publications in fields related (even tangentially) to AI safety and machine learning
- University-level physics, mathematics, computer science or computational neuroscience
- Non language-modelling aspects of ML such as reinforcement learning, bayesian graphical models, statistics etc
What the job involves
- Working with other alignment researchers to propose, run, analyse, and visualise experiments
- Working on large-scale ML frameworks that train models in parallel across many machines
- Working within and extending our research agenda including defining and executing on your own research projects
- Building internal tooling and infrastructure for model inference, visualisation, and interpretability
- Implementing new models or techniques from research papers
- Doing exploratory mechanistic interpretability research
Salary benchmarks
Otta's take
Sam Franklin
CEO of Otta
According to the founders of Conjecture, the speed at which AI is progressing means that even many experts in the field lack a fundamental understanding of its internal mechanics. Thus, there’s potentially a huge risk should it go beyond our control.
The company conducts R&D to make sure that this is avoided, by ensuring that current AI models are controllable and transparent. While this safety-oriented research is Conjecture’s primary focus, it’s also developing a number of B2B AI products itself. This balance of being for-profit yet for the common good is an interesting dynamic, but Conjecture maintains that being profit-driven will ensure plenty of cash flow to allow deeper research.
The fact that Conjecture was quick to gain VC investment, in the same year as its launch, suggests that this was a shrewd business decision. As the spotlight on AI grows, there is real potential for Conjecture as it looks to expand swiftly and make a big impact on the ever-changing AI ecosystem.
Insights
Company
Employee endorsements
Challenging work
"As a startup in AI safety, it's both challenging to solve the technical and research difficulties of figuring out alignment, as well as building up..."
Funding (2 rounds)
Oct 2022
$10m
SEED
Feb 2022
$10m
SEED
Total funding: $20m
Company benefits
- Private healthcare and dental
- Generous PTO
- Reimbursement for personal coaching
- Relocation cover
- Free lunch + dinner
- Unlimited sick time
- Work from home when needed
- Company cards, books + conference materials
- Latest MacBook Pro
Company HQ
London, UK
Articles
Founders
Connor Leahy
(CEO)Former Machine Learning Engineer and Researcher at AI research and application company Aleph Alpha. Is also the Co-founder of EleutherAI, a collective of open source-oriented AI researchers.
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