Application Guide
How to Apply for Senior Research Engineer
at Far.Ai
🏢 About Far.Ai
FAR.AI is a rapidly growing non-profit AI research institute focused exclusively on AI safety, with a track record of impactful work including 40+ academic papers and direct collaboration with frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. What makes them unique is their practical approach—they don't just publish papers but drive real-world change through red-teaming, government collaboration, and community-building initiatives like FAR.Labs in Berkeley.
About This Role
This Senior Research Engineer role focuses on scaling research by solving challenging engineering problems within FAR.AI's core safety agendas, while mentoring and unblocking other technical staff. It's impactful because you'll directly accelerate research that addresses critical AI safety risks and influences leading AI developers and policymakers.
💡 A Day in the Life
A typical day might involve debugging a distributed training pipeline to accelerate a safety evaluation experiment, pairing with a researcher to unblock a technical hurdle in their adversarial testing code, and reviewing design documents for new research infrastructure to increase team productivity. You'll likely collaborate across remote teams while contributing to core safety agendas like red-teaming or robustness research.
🚀 Application Tools
🎯 Who Far.Ai Is Looking For
- Has experience tackling complex engineering problems in AI/ML research environments, likely with a background in scaling experiments, infrastructure, or tooling for research teams.
- Demonstrates strong mentorship skills and experience unblocking technical challenges for other researchers or engineers.
- Is deeply aligned with AI safety mission and understands practical safety agendas (e.g., red-teaming, robustness, alignment).
- Can balance hands-on technical work with strategic thinking to increase research depth and scale.
📝 Tips for Applying to Far.Ai
Highlight specific examples where you've scaled or accelerated research projects—mention metrics like reduced experiment time, increased throughput, or enabled new research directions.
Emphasize experience with AI safety-relevant technical areas (e.g., adversarial robustness, interpretability tools, large-scale model evaluation) even if not explicitly listed.
Showcase mentorship or collaboration that unblocked others—describe a technical problem you helped a team member solve.
Tailor your resume to FAR.AI's non-profit mission: frame past work in terms of societal impact, not just commercial outcomes.
Reference FAR.AI's published work—mention a specific paper or project that excites you and explain how your skills could contribute.
✉️ What to Emphasize in Your Cover Letter
["Your alignment with FAR.AI's mission of ensuring AI safety and your understanding of their practical approach (e.g., red-teaming, policy engagement).", 'Concrete examples of engineering work that accelerated or scaled research projects, especially in AI/ML contexts.', 'Experience mentoring or unblocking technical colleagues, with specific anecdotes.', "How you'd contribute to one of their core safety agendas—mention a specific area like evaluation, robustness, or alignment based on their published work."]
Generate Cover Letter →🔍 Research Before Applying
To stand out, make sure you've researched:
- → Read 2-3 FAR.AI papers (check their website or arXiv) to understand their technical focus and safety agendas.
- → Explore their collaborations—look up their work with Anthropic, OpenAI, and government institutes to grasp their real-world impact.
- → Understand their non-profit structure and how it differs from corporate AI labs—review their mission statement and recent media coverage.
- → Learn about FAR.Labs and their community initiatives to see how they support the broader AI safety ecosystem.
💬 Prepare for These Interview Topics
Based on this role, you may be asked about:
⚠️ Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Focusing solely on technical prowess without demonstrating mentorship or collaboration skills.
- Treating this as a generic ML engineering role—failing to engage with AI safety specifics or FAR.AI's mission.
- Overemphasizing commercial or product experience without connecting it to research scaling or non-profit contexts.
📅 Application Timeline
This position is open until filled. However, we recommend applying as soon as possible as roles at mission-driven organizations tend to fill quickly.
Typical hiring timeline:
Application Review
1-2 weeks
Initial Screening
Phone call or written assessment
Interviews
1-2 rounds, usually virtual
Offer
Congratulations!