Research Scientist, Agent Robustness

Scale Labs, Research Scientist - Agent Robustness

As the leading data and evaluation partner for frontier AI companies, Scale plays an integral role in understanding the capabilities and safeguarding AI models and systems. Building on this expertise, Scale Labs has launched a new team focused on policy research, to bridge the gap between AI research and global policymakers to make informed, scientific decisions about AI risks and capabilities.

Our research tackles the hardest problems in agent robustness, AI control protocols, and AI risk evaluations to help governments, industry, and the public understand and mitigate AI risk while maximizing AI adoption. This team collaborates broadly across industry, the public sector, and academia and regularly publishes our findings. We are actively seeking talented researchers to join us in shaping this vision.

As a Research Scientist working on Agent Robustness you will work on the fundamental challenges of building AI agents that are safe and aligned with humans. For example, you might:

• Research the science of AI agent capabilities with a focus on how they relate to safety, risk factors, and methodologies for benchmarking them;
• Design and build harnesses to test AI agents' tendency to take harmful actions when pressured to do so by users or tricked into doing so by elements of their environment;
• Design and build exploits and mitigations for new and unique failure modes that arise as AI agents gain affordances like coding, web browsing, and computer use;
• Characterize and design mitigations for potential failure modes or broader risks of systems involving multiple interacting AI agents.

Ideally you'd have:

• Commitment to our mission of promoting safe, secure, and trustworthy AI deployments in the industry as frontier AI capabilities continue to advance.
• Practical experience conducting technical research collaboratively. You should be comfortable building and leveraging agent scaffolding, designing evaluation harnesses, and quickly turning new ideas from the research literature into working prototypes.
• Experience with post-training and RL techniques such as RLHF, DPO, GRPO, and similar approaches.
• A track record of published research in machine learning, particularly in generative AI.
• At least three years of experience addressing sophisticated ML problems, whether in a research setting or in product development.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills to operate in a cross-functional team.

Nice to have:

• Hands‑on experience with agent evaluation frameworks such as SWE‑bench, Web Arena, OSWorld, Inspect, or similar tools.
• Experience with red‑teaming, prompt injection, or adversarial testing of AI systems.

Our research interviews are crafted to assess candidates' skills in practical ML prototyping and debugging, their grasp of research concepts, and their alignment with our organizational culture. We will not ask any Leet Code‑style questions. If you're excited about advancing AI safety and contributing to our mission, we encourage you to apply, even if your experience doesn't perfectly align with every requirement.

• Base salary, equity, and benefits. Salary range for this full‑time position in San Francisco, New York, Seattle: $216,000 to $270,000 USD.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Retirement benefits.
• Learning and development stipend.
• Generous PTO.
• Commuter stipend (may be eligible).

At Scale, we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or veteran status.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at  Please see the United States Department of Labor’s Know Your Rights poster for additional information.

We comply with the United States Department of Labor’s Pay Transparency provision.

We collect, retain and use personal data for our professional business purposes, including notifying you of job opportunities that may be of interest and sharing with our affiliates. We limit the personal data we collect to that which we believe is appropriate and necessary to manage applicants’ needs, provide our services, and comply with applicable laws. Any information we collect in connection with your application will be treated in accordance with our internal policies and programs designed to protect personal data.

Please see our privacy policy for additional information.

Please note:

Our policy requires a 90‑day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.