Research Scientist — World Models

Compensation

USD 200,000-300,000 base · sabbatical accrual + 1,500 H100-hour/quarter research-dividend equivalent. Salary is paid in your country's currency at the prevailing exchange rate; the band is independent of country of residence (this is one of the lab's load-bearing trade-offs — see /funding).

What you'll do

• Lead or co-lead a research thread in compositional latent dynamics, embodied simulation, counterfactual rollouts, or cross-modal latent unification.
• Pull capacity from the 70k-environment simulation pool, contribute environments back where useful, and engage substantively with bessel-04's quarterly evaluation-methodology review.
• Co-author papers at NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML and the corresponding alphabell internal-index entries; reviewing peer work at those venues is part of the role.
• Pair with interpretability cells (typically hilbert-13 or hadamard-08) on cross-modal coherence work — the interpretability axis has invested in tooling specifically for world-model architectures, and you are expected to use it.
• Maintain or contribute to one open-source artefact (ab-operators, ab-robust-worlds, ab-symbolic, or the 70k-env pool itself).
• Participate fully in the lab's async-by-default working mode. Time-zone overlap is treated as a constraint, not as a coordination strategy.
• Vote-of-record accrues at 24 months of signed contribution; participation in lab-level governance is encouraged but not required during your first two years.

What we look for

Must-haves

• PhD in computer science, ML, applied mathematics, physics, robotics, or a closely related field, or equivalent demonstrated research output.
• Strong publication record in world models, predictive generative modelling, robotics, RL, or compositional representation learning.
• Demonstrated capacity to design experiments that resist easy interpolation explanations — your evaluation methodology should expose what your method does not generalise to, not just what it does.
• Fluent written English at the level required to publish to the lab's internal index and pass cross-axis methodology review.
• Comfort with the lab's structural commitments described in the charter.
• Capacity to work async — the world-models axis is the most geographically distributed at the lab.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with operator-based dynamics models, neural ODEs, or related compositional frameworks.
• Robotics or embodied-simulation background, particularly with the kinds of contact-rich and partial-observability settings that the 70k-env pool emphasises.
• Public writing or Alignment Forum posts on the topic of what world models are for and where their failure modes come from.
• Familiarity with the lab's existing world-models work (compositional latent dynamics, the 70k-env study, the counterfactual-rollouts deployment study).
• Experience reviewing for NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML.

What we offer

• Relocation support — for roles that involve moving anchor or country, the lab covers reasonable relocation costs (movers, short-term accommodation up to 8 weeks, and a one-time settlement allowance). The standard relocation package is documented and rate-equalised; we do not negotiate it individually.
• Visa sponsorship — where the residency country and role warrant it, the lab sponsors work visas and (for long-tenured roles) supports the pathway to permanent residency. Visa work is shepherded by the relevant anchor steward, not outsourced to a third-party HR firm.
• Parental leave — 26 weeks fully paid for birthing parents, 16 weeks fully paid for non-birthing parents, with a phased return-to-work option. This is independent of country of residence and is one of the lab-wide compensation policies that is not negotiable.
• Sabbatical — every contributor accrues sabbatical time from year one; full-time contributors at the 36-month tenure mark are eligible for a 12-week paid sabbatical, with a longer 24-week option at 72 months. Sabbaticals are taken; we monitor.
• Compute allowance — every full-time research role carries an associated research-dividend H100-hour quarterly allowance, allocated through the federated scheduler under the standard mechanism. The allowance is in addition to your cell's pooled compute and is yours to direct.
• Conference and travel budget — USD 12,000-18,000 per year (role-dependent) for attendance at NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML / AAMAS / CAV / POPL / AISI workshops, plus an additional invited-talks allowance covered independently.
• Sustainable workload — explicitly anti-burnout — the lab tracks contributor working hours (self-reported, monthly) and treats sustained overage as a structural problem to be addressed at the cell-steward or anchor-steward level rather than a virtue to be celebrated. We have data on which cells push their members hardest and we act on it. Vote-of-record contributors have the standing to flag burnout patterns in their own or adjacent cells.
• Equipment — laptop of your choice, an ergonomic workstation, and a contributor allowance for the secondary equipment you'll inevitably need.

How to apply

Send your application to apply@alphabell.com. We respond to every application; we do not use applicant-tracking automation that ignores submissions.

Required:

• A CV or résumé covering your research and engineering trajectory, including specific roles and the substantive technical work in each.
• Two short pieces of public writing in the style of an Alignment Forum post or an alphabell internal-index report (800-1,500 words each). These should be on AI safety topics; we are looking for evidence of substantive thinking under conditions where the answer is not yet clear. If you have prior public writing that fits, send links instead of new writing.
• A 1-page research proposal scoped to the role you are applying for, naming the cell(s) you would want to work with and the specific question you would want to take on in the first 12 months. Proposals do not need to be definitive — we revise these together once we start talking — but they need to be concrete.

For PhD and postdoctoral roles, also include two references; we will reach out to them after the second interview round.

We typically respond within four weeks. Our interview process — for non-PhD roles — has three stages: a written exchange about the proposal, a 90-minute substantive conversation with the host cell, and a final meeting with the relevant axis steward. We do not whiteboard-code; we do not do leetcode-style interviews; we do not run timed take-home tests.

Equal opportunity

Equal opportunity statement. alphabell is committed to a contributor pool that is broad in background, country of residence, training history, and structural perspective. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, national or ethnic origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or parenthood status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We actively seek applicants from communities under-represented in AI safety research, and we treat the structural commitments described in our research conduct charter — including those bearing on dual-use research and paired interpretability — as applying equally to every contributor regardless of background. The lab's anchor stewards and the long-tenured contributor pool review hiring and onboarding patterns quarterly; substantive disparities are treated as governance items rather than as HR statistics. If you require accommodation in the application or interview process, please indicate this in your initial email; the request will be handled by the anchor steward responsible for the role rather than by an outsourced HR function.

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