Software Engineer — Federated Compute Substrate

Compensation

USD 200,000-310,000 base · sabbatical accrual + 1,000 H100-hour/quarter research-dividend equivalent. Salary band independent of country of residence.

What you'll do

• Lead engineering on the federated compute scheduler (currently v2 GA) — partial-preemption escrow for long RSI runs, quadratic-voting machinery, dual-jurisdiction allocation, tenure-weighted priority computation.
• Own portions of ab-trace v4 — the content-addressed execution-trace store that every substrate-hosted agent emits to and every paired interpretability cell reads from.
• Operate the scheduler in production across 12 federated operators in 9 jurisdictions. The job is in equal parts research engineering and SRE-leaning systems engineering.
• Contribute to the lab's interconnect-agreement reviews when new operators come online — including the RSI-axis isolated-enclave clauses, which are load-bearing for the lab's safety posture.
• Maintain the scheduler's open-source release at github.com/alphabell-labs/ab-scheduler and respond to issues from external operators evaluating the toolchain.
• Participate in cross-axis methodology review pool when scheduler changes have governance implications (most of them do).
• Mentor cohort members rotating through polya-25 or babbage-14 during the project-rotation phase.

What we look for

Must-haves

• 5+ years of production systems engineering at a meaningful scale (distributed systems, schedulers, content-addressed storage, federation infrastructure).
• Deep comfort with the operational realities of running production systems across multiple jurisdictions and operators with different SLAs.
• Capacity to engage with the research side of the lab — you will be writing code that participates in the lab's governance and you will be invited to co-author reports.
• Strong written communication. Operating documentation, change logs, and incident reports are all part of the role.
• Comfort with the lab's structural commitments and the operational implications of paired-cell read access on the systems you maintain.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with quadratic voting, mechanism design, or governance tooling.
• Prior contributions to ab-scheduler or ab-trace.
• Experience with cross-organisational pairing protocols (the Constellation partnership is opening this surface area).
• Open-source maintainership track record — issue triage, semver discipline, release notes that don't lie.
• Familiarity with the lab's existing tooling-axis publications, particularly federated-compute-scheduler (24/17), federated-trace-auditing (24/16), and counterfactual-trajectory-replay (25/19).

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.

---

Other open roles

← All open roles