ML Research Engineer, Trust & Safety

ROLE OVERVIEW

This is an individual contributor role blending ML research, applied ML, and

software engineering. Topics include trust and safety challenges for large

language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs):

* Prompt injection attacks and adversarial robustness

* Safety alignment and guardrails

* Privacy and confidentiality

* (Mechanistic) interpretability

RESPONSIBILITIES

* Designing and executing research experiments on LLM trust and safety

* Reading, synthesizing, and producing research papers and technical write-ups

* Building, running, and owning systems end-to-end

* Contributing to core product capabilities as a founding team member

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

ML & RESEARCH

* Demonstrated research experience; PhD in a technical field strongly preferred

* Ability to identify relevant research questions and find answers through

literature review or experimentation

* First-author or major contributing authorship on peer-reviewed publications;

please list these on your resume or cover letter

* Hands-on experience with PyTorch, HuggingFace (Transformers, Datasets), and

applied deep learning

* Experience training and evaluating deep learning models

* Nice to have: LLM fine-tuning, multimodal LLMs, PEFT/LoRA

* Nice to have: Familiarity with ML interpretability methods (mechanistic

interpretability, sparse autoencoders, linear probes, NLP/Vision

interpretability)

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

* Proficiency in Python; experience with Jupyter notebooks

* Unix environments, Git, and basic AWS/GCP usage

* Nice to have: Programming languages well-roundedness; experience with

statically-typed and functional programming languages

* Nice to have: Familiarity with (LLM) deployment tooling like Docker, vLLM,

Triton Inference Server or similar

LOGISTICS

* Available to start within 2 months

* Role may include limited on-call responsibilities tied to production

ownership

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

* This is a founding, high-ownership role with direct impact on core product

capabilities.

* You will be expected to build, run, and own systems end-to-end.

* The role may include limited on-call responsibilities aligned with production

ownership.

ABOUT REALMLABS

* AI systems misbehave: they leak sensitive data, get manipulated through

prompt injections, or behave in ways their builders never intended. RealmLabs

is building the infrastructure to detect, debug, and prevent these behaviors.

* Our approach is to secure AI from within: observing models from the inside,

extracting signals relevant to their behavior and misbehavior, and patching

them on the inside, rather than relying on input/output filters or external

guardrails.

* We are a pre-seed startup and a finalist in the RSAC 2026 Innovation Sandbox.

Our customers include Anthropic, a leading ride-sharing platform, and a Big 3

management consulting firm.

* This is a founding engineer role with meaningful equity at an early-stage

company.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

* Market aligned compensation and benefits.

* Founding equity (Equity is a significant component of this role and will be

discussed)

* Medical, Dental, Vision, Life insurance, 401-K, In-office lunch etc.

VISA SPONSORSHIP

* We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas

for every role and candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make all

reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to

help with this.