We are a nonprofit raising policymaker awareness about AI risks, aiming to slow potentially dangerous research and accelerate technical safety. We have ambitious goals and need to move fast. Come work with us! About Palisade

Here's the kind of problems you’ll work on in this role:

• Build reproducible conda environments in Colab. Conda is a Python package manager. Colab is a managed Jupyter notebook platform. How do we inject Conda environments into Colab? Making progress here requires understanding how Python looks for modules and how binary compatibility works.
• Reverse engineer wandb weave API and wrap it for researchers use. Wandb weave is a new product by wandb.ai for tracing LLM applications. Unfortunately, it has no public API—which we need to write custom aggregations over logs. We'll likely have to reverse engineer from their (hairy) React +Python code and GraphQL schemas.
• Run high-performance LLM inference on HuggingFace TGI. TGI is an Inference-aaS platform. We'd like to explore running inference on TPUs to improve latency and cost-efficiency; this requires compiling to a custom format and waddling through scientific computing-class (i.e. poor) documentation. Expect CUDA errors.

Our collaboration process looks like this:

• We post daily statuses for each other to keep in sync regarding our directions. Each project has two sync meetings per week to keep it on track; we have an all-hands demo meet every two weeks.
• We propose new ideas or directions by writing up a doc, sharing it, and getting comments. This enables async communication.
• Our median response time to each other is in hours, not minutes; we work in an independent and self-directed fashion. Your supervisor helps you maintain direction; colleagues help with the implementation; you keep track of your tasks and milestones.

Here are the key traits one needs to succeed in this role:

• Excellent and broad software engineering skills.

• Strong writing skills.

• Aptitude for self-directed, high-agency work. You take initiative and contribute proactively; we don’t micromanage.

• Aptitude for cross-functional collaboration and learning. You do what it takes to ship your work.

• Motivation to conduct research that is both curiosity-driven and addresses concrete open questions in AI risk.

Hiring process

1. Apply with a CV and a cover letter. In the cover letter:
   1. Provide evidence of aptitude for self-directed high-agency work (<150 words)
   2. Provide evidence of exceptional ability (<150 words)
2. Interview
3. Paid trial, 1-2 weeks

This is a remote position. Apply with this form.