Visiting Fellow programme — 6-month residencies

Compensation

USD 95,000-140,000 stipend for the 6-month residency period (prorated; equivalent to USD 190,000-280,000 annualised). Travel allowance to and from the residency anchor, plus a research-dividend H100-hour allocation appropriate to the fellow's project.

What you'll do

• Spend six months embedded in a cell (or, occasionally, across two cells) working on a research problem you propose in your application.
• Produce a defined output: most commonly one paper co-authored with the host cell, sometimes a tooling contribution or a methodology document.
• Participate fully in cell working sessions, cross-axis methodology review pools (if your residency overlaps with one), and contributor-cohort interactions.
• Sign the research conduct charter for the duration of the residency. Vote-of-record does not accrue during the residency; this is the only contributor category at the lab without an eventual vote-of-record path through tenure (the lab's view is that fellowships should not be the typical onramp to long-tenured contribution).
• Bring your own research perspective. Visiting fellows are most useful when they have a substantive disagreement with the host cell's current direction; we like that.
• Comply with the lab's dual-use review and pairing requirements if the residency's work qualifies.

What we look for

Must-haves

• Established researcher (mid-career PhD+ or equivalent industry research track record).
• Strong publication record in at least one of the lab's four axes.
• A concrete project proposal that the host cell can scope to fit a 6-month window.
• Capacity to relocate to or work remotely with one of the lab's four anchor regions for the residency duration.
• Willingness to engage substantively with the lab's structural commitments rather than treating the residency as a hosted-sabbatical-with-resources arrangement.

Nice-to-haves

• Existing collaboration with one or more alphabell contributors.
• Public writing about your own institutional context — what works, what doesn't, where the gaps are. We are interested in researchers who think structurally.
• A track record of cross-organisation collaboration; the External Evaluation Cooperative members regularly co-sponsor fellow nominations.
• Comfort with the async-by-default working mode.
• Capacity to bring a contributor cohort member or two into the project as paired work.

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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