Tooling Engineer

MATS Research, Inc. BERKELEY, California, United States

MATS finds and trains talented individuals for what we see as the world's most urgent and talent-constrained problem: reducing risks from unaligned artificial intelligence. We believe ambitious researchers from a variety of backgrounds have the potential to meaningfully contribute to alignment, control, security, and governance research. Through our research fellowship, we provide mentorship, training, professional network, and financial support to accelerate their careers and increase their impact.

Since 2021, we have trained over 630 researchers. 75% of pre-2026 fellows continue to work in AI alignment. 10% have co-founded organizations. Our fellows have produced 215+ research papers with 17,000+ citations. And we are just getting started: in the coming year we will expand our program to support even more researchers.

MATS provides research compute to its fellows across GPU providers, API providers, cloud platforms, and our own GPU cluster. The Compute team manages the platforms, budgets, and workflows that get that compute into fellows’ hands, and builds tooling and infrastructure around how researchers access and use it.

As a Tooling Engineer, you build the tools and infrastructure that make those systems easier to use, operate, and scale. Some of this is automation and interfaces around compute access, provisioning, budgets, and usage. Platform work includes giving fellows simpler ways to reach compute across many providers and giving the team better visibility and control over cost and usage. The role also includes research tooling, adopting, extending, or building the agent, evaluation, and data infrastructure fellows use in their AI safety research.

You will work closely with the Compute team, other teams across MATS, and fellows to understand where the friction is and ship useful solutions. Your work will span internal tooling and automation as well as reusable research tooling, with the mix changing as our needs evolve. You will also work with MATS’s security function, particularly where tooling and research infrastructure intersect.

You will contribute to our GPU cluster and cloud infrastructure where useful; you do not need to arrive as an HPC or cloud specialist, and we expect to help you build context in these systems. This is a small team with a large surface area. You will have substantial ownership over what gets built, with a strong preference for adopting and extending existing tools over building from scratch when they fit.

• A full-stack or backend engineer who has built internal tools or platforms for technical users and enjoys the product side as much as the code.
• A data or platform engineer who has built pipelines and integrations against third-party APIs and wants to work more closely with research.
• A research engineer or technical generalist from an AI lab, startup, or safety organization who ships quickly and wants to build infrastructure that other researchers use.

If you do not fit perfectly into one of these profiles but believe your skills are a strong match for the responsibilities, we are still excited for you to apply.

• Build tools and automation around compute access, provisioning, budgets, usage, and requests, and automate recurring workflows for teams across MATS.
• Work directly with fellows and the Compute team to understand workflows, identify operational bottlenecks, and turn recurring problems into reusable tools.

• Build simpler, more unified ways to access and manage compute across the GPU, API, and cloud providers we support, adopting and extending…