Member of Technical Staff, Research Scientist - Safety Environments

Plato is an applied research lab building infrastructure for training specialized AI agents. The Research Scientist will establish and lead research on safety environments and benchmarks, initially evaluating AI R&D capabilities and investigating misaligned behaviors. The role includes designing experiments, collaborating with engineers to build runnable environments, and sharing findings with lab partners.

Responsibilities:

• Design Safety Benchmarks: Measure AI research automation and self-improvement. Define tasks, baselines, budgets, and success criteria that separate meaningful progress from superficial completion
• Build Safety Environments: Design environments that expose reward hacking, sabotage, deception, and failures to follow intended constraints
• Hold the Evaluation Bar: Investigate contamination, grader weaknesses, task ambiguity, and shortcuts that could make a result misleading
• Track Frontier Capabilities: Run experiments with current models, inspect trajectories and failures, and measure how capabilities change across models and over time
• Work with Engineering: Turn research designs into reproducible environments with clear scoring, useful instrumentation, and documented limitations
• Share the Findings: Translate results into benchmark releases, research reports, and concrete recommendations for lab partners