METR · 1 month ago
Research Stream Lead
Berkeley
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level
$250K/yr - $450K/yrMETR is a nonprofit research organization focused on assessing AI capabilities and risks. The Research Stream Lead will lead a team to address critical questions regarding AI model risks and improve METR's risk reports while maintaining high research integrity and team performance.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)CharityNon Profit
Responsibilities
Collaborate with other research streams to identify the questions that need to be answered for METR to be able to accurately assess catastrophic risk from models in the near and longer-term future
Lead research to answer these questions as cheaply and effectively as possible, trading off between being scrappy and careful in the right places
Significantly improve METR's risk reports based on the research your team has done
Publish 'fundamental' research that’s similarly impactful to the time horizon methodology
Maintain METR’s high-integrity culture - communicate research accurately and don’t overhype - even critics or skeptics generally praise the work's quality
Build a strong team, identify talent needs and be an effective hiring manager, maintain high standards of performance on your team, grow and empower top performers
Lead team effectively, get people excited about and bought into goals, maintain motivation and momentum
Maintain high research velocity: we're generally learning meaningful new things every week or two (unless we're explicitly investing in a large high-payoff project we've derisked)
Qualification
Required
Experience leading high-performing research teams working with frontier ML systems, such as alignment, post-training, interpretability, or frontier evaluations
Track record of high-quality ML research, with clear evidence of multiple impactful research outputs (such as papers, blog-posts, etc.) where you are a key contributor
High quality output that's highly relevant to METR's work. You have public research, writing, code or some other artifact that demonstrates your careful thinking, deep understanding of and ability to make progress on METR's research directions
Preferred
Experience as a research manager in an ML related area (or a technical non-ML field like quantitative trading while also keeping up with relevant ML / AI safety literature)
Experience as a technical engineering manager, including with some experience with fast-moving/scrappy research workflows
Evidence of outstanding achievement. You have some other impressive achievement that demonstrates you have the relevant skills or can learn very quickly, such as founding a successful startup, having widely-used open-source projects, or having made scientific contributions outside your area of expertise
Benefits
Catered lunch and dinner daily; in-office gym and shower
Stipend for moving to the Bay Area
Unlimited PTO and 21-week parental leave for new parents
Monthly transit/parking stipend and an annual Uber budget
For training, courses, conferences, and AI safety education
For therapy, medication, and other mental health expenses
For gym memberships and other wellness expenses
For home office and workstation equipment expenses
Company
METR
METR is a research non-profit that develops evaluations to empirically test AI systems for capabilities that could threaten catastrophic harm to society.
Founded in 2022
11-50 employees
H1B Sponsorship
METR has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (6)
2024 (2)
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase