Research Engineer, Frontier Safety Mitigations, DeepMind

Applicants in San Francisco: Qualified applications with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act.

Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: San Francisco, CA, USA; Mountain View, CA, USA.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

• 5 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages.

• 3 years of experience testing, maintaining, or launching software products, and 1 year of experience with software design and architecture.

• Experience working across the research-to-deployment pipeline in a frontier AI environment.

Preferred qualifications:

• PhD in Computer Science or Machine Learning, or publications at venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, or EMNLP.

• Experience with cybersecurity detection and response, building classifiers and anomaly detection systems at scale, taking safety defenses or mitigations from research concepts to scalable production systems.

• Experience collaborating on or leading applied ML projects, including LLM training, inference, and fine-tuning.

• Experience using AI coding agents with strong architectural judgment and with TPUs and JAX.

• Knowledge of AI control, chain-of-thought monitoring, faithfulness, monitorability, and related frontier safety research.

• Background in adversarial machine learning, automated red-teaming, or model interpretability and probes.

About the job

Our team focuses on de-risking model launches by defending against critical misuse domains such as Cybersecurity, CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Conventional Explosive), and Harmful Manipulation. Currently, this involves building novel evaluations, red-teaming, researching and deploying advanced mitigations (both in-model and out-of-model), and monitoring emerging risks. We ensure that our mitigations are highly robust, while still enabling the beneficial use of our technology.

GDM is a dedicated scientific community, committed to ‘solving intelligence’ and ensuring our technology is used for widespread public benefit.

The Frontier Safety Mitigation team operates in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment. We have a strong culture of support, dedication, and teamwork. We take the possibility of tangibly dangerous model capabilities seriously as AI advances. Because of this, we believe that proactively researching and implementing robust, defense-in-depth mitigations is a critical part of the overall strategy for building safe AI.

We are looking for a research engineer for the Frontier Safety Mitigation team within the Gemini Safety team. In this role, you will help us build the next generation of safety mitigations for frontier models. This role is highly applied and focuses on building robust, end-to-end defenses against severe risks. This work feeds directly into DeepMind's Frontier Safety Framework commitments.

Artificial intelligence will be one of humanity’s most transformative inventions. At Google DeepMind, we are a pioneering AI lab with exceptional interdisciplinary teams focused on advancing AI development to solve complex global challenges and accelerate high-quality product innovation for billions of users. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, ensuring safety and ethics are always our highest priority.

We are pushing the boundaries across multiple domains. Our global teams offer diverse learning opportunities and varied career pathways for those driven to achieve exceptional results through collective effort.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $174,000-$252,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Build advanced classifiers and data pipelines to detect misuse, owning the end-to-end process from automated evaluation to rapid model iteration.

• Build cross-context monitoring systems to detect coordinated harms, developing novel signal aggregation methods across disparate user sessions to identify large-scale attack vectors.

• Implement data-driven, semi-automated account-level response systems to detect, track, and apply strikes against persistent malicious actors using rich signals from production traffic.

• Evaluate and secure agentic AI systems by developing threat models,