---
title: 'Research Engineer - Oversight Foundations at Transluce'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-oversight-foundations-transluce-san-francisco-tggwq73gfg0s'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Research Engineer - Oversight Foundations at Transluce

- **Company:** Transluce
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-06-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/transluce/am9icG9zdDp31NZm7VBVRjNgxG9dAHuU

## Job description

Salary range: $250,000 - $500,000/year + benefits

Description: Transluce is a non-profit research lab building tools for scalable, end-to-end oversight of AI systems. We build world-class, AI-backed analysis tools and use these to set industry standards for evaluation. Our tools are integrated with core agent benchmarks like SWE-bench, while our evaluations are directly underpinning regulation, including our role as EU AI Office’s main evaluation developer for harmful manipulation risks.

About the role: We are looking for strong scientists and engineers to help advance our vision ofhttps://bounded-regret.ghost.io/oversight-assiturning-compute-into-understanding/[oversight foundation models](https://transluce.org/foundation-models-for-oversight): AI systems that formalize, test, and answer questions about the behavior of other AI systems. As part of our highly collaborative team, you will learn and grow quickly, creating technology at the frontier of AI research and with high direct impact.

Core responsibility: Help us develop and train scalable oversight assistants that can predict and detect unexpected and subtle behaviors in AI systems. This includes:

- Creating diverse evaluations that range in difficulty. This involves finding naturally occurring interesting and undesirable behaviors exhibited by open-source models.
- Developing novel architectures and objectives for training oversight assistants.
- Scaling up the training and inference pipelines to support up to 1T-scale models.

Qualities of a strong candidate:

- Experience with fine-tuning language models, designing new architectures, and creating evaluations.
- Reliable results: good experimental design, epistemic self-awareness and transparency
- Generativeness: coming up with original, productive ideas for unblocking progress
- Curiosity: a desire to understand ML systems and how they work
- Strong programming ability, including navigating trade-offs between prototyping speed and maintainability
- Strong communication skills, low ego, openness to giving and receiving feedback

We are located in San Francisco and enthusiastic to work together in-person. We are open to sponsoring international visas.

## About Transluce

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Transluce is a nonprofit research lab building the open-source technology stack for scalable, public oversight of AI systems.
- **Entity Type**: Nonprofit (Private, Independent Research Lab)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jacob Steinhardt (Co-founder & CEO), Sarah Schwettmann (Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Safety Research / Interpretability
- **Target customers**: Frontier AI labs, governments, and the broader public; their tools are designed for use by independent evaluators, policymakers, and researchers.
- **Mission**: To build the infrastructure for understanding AI, steering its development in the public interest, and enabling a public science of model behavior.

## Products & Services
- **Activation Oracles**: A scalable, AI-driven interpretability tool for understanding model behavior, shown to improve with model size, data quality, and data volume. Research paper published on scaling to trillion-parameter models. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
- **Mental Health Evaluation**: The most expansive independent evaluation to date of how leading AI models respond to users in mental health crises, published in August 2026. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
- **Oversight Assistant Platform**: An end-to-end system for AI oversight, designed to help researchers and evaluators analyze model behavior at scale. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (nonprofit organization).
- **Key Metric**: Team size of 22 employees, with **109.1% yearly headcount growth** (LinkedIn). Funded by philanthropic donors; specific funding amounts are not publicly disclosed.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: 
  - **Mike McCormick**: First Funder and Board Member [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
  - **Common Sense Media**: Independent technical research partner for the Youth AI Safety Institute (announced May 2026) [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Expanding from 20 employees to 40+ in the next year (July 2026 hiring announcement) [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
  - Published two major research papers in August 2026 (on Scaling Activation Oracles and Scaling Laws for Exact String Elicitation) [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
  - Recruiting for high-level roles including VP of Engineering, signaling rapid scaling [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/transluce)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Independence & Public Interest Mandate**: Operates as a truly independent, nonprofit lab with no commercial conflicts — they have a published Independence and Transparency Policy and a Responsible Disclosure Policy [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/about).
- **Open Source & Scalable Tech**: All tools are built open-source to allow public vetting and improve reliability, a key differentiator from proprietary black-box audits.
- **Talent Magnet**: Attracts alumni from top AI labs and organizations including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Carnegie Mellon University. Their alumni go on to roles at Google DeepMind, Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, and other key institutions [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling Interpretability**: Training larger models and developing tools that work on trillion-parameter systems [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/).
- **Public Science of AI**: Building an open scientific ecosystem where evaluations and methods are publicly vetted and reproducible.
- **Government & Industry Partnerships**: Engaging with frontier AI labs and governments to ensure internal assessments match publicly vetted standards.
- **Youth AI Safety**: Research partnership with Common Sense Media for the Youth AI Safety Institute, focusing on how AI models behave in mental health contexts [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-Driven Work**: Directly contribute to AI safety and public understanding of a technology with extraordinary societal consequences.
- **Growth Trajectory**: Explosive headcount growth (109% YoY) with aggressive hiring plans (doubling team to 40+ in the next year) means significant impact and career acceleration for early employees [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).
- **Workspace**: In-office at HQ in San Francisco, California (1301 Sansome St). Employees work from a physical office with a strong emphasis on in-person collaboration [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/transluce).
- **Culture**: Described as a place where you "run the systems that let the technical team focus on AI safety research" and create "clarity out of ambiguity" — suited for motivated generalists and technical experts alike [linkedin.com](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce).
- **Open Roles** (as of Aug/Sep 2026): VP of Engineering, AI Behavior Engineer, Operations Generalist, Research Scientist/Research Engineer, Full-Stack Product Engineer, AI Systems Engineer, Research Engineer - Scalable Interpretability [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/transluce).

## Sources
1. [transluce.org](https://transluce.org/)
2. [transluce.org/about](https://transluce.org/about)
3. [linkedin.com/company/transluce](https://linkedin.com/company/transluce)
4. [builtin.com/company/transluce](https://builtin.com/company/transluce)
5. [jobs.gem.com/transluce](https://jobs.gem.com/transluce)

## Other roles at Transluce

- [Business Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-manager-transluce-san-francisco-0wqvya5tm7cv) — San Francisco, CA
- [People Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-manager-transluce-san-francisco-rerrmd8ypmpq) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Behavior Researcher - Agent Alignment](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-behavior-researcher-agent-alignment-transluce-san-francisco-71m857j6ac40) — San Francisco, CA
- [VP of Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/vp-of-engineering-transluce-san-francisco-m3yzxzmhekj5) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Behavior Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-behavior-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-mr9gkhnfhpyr) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Behavior Researcher - Human Impacts](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-behavior-researcher-human-impacts-transluce-san-francisco-07997m7d0kkp) — San Francisco, CA
- [Governance & Policy Fellow](https://feeny.ai/job/governance-policy-fellow-transluce-san-francisco-dejeq9hbc6sc) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Systems Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-systems-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-21qzm98xjn4t) — San Francisco, CA
- [Full-Stack Product Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-product-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-akrtqqxqthmn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Research Scientist/Research Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-research-engineer-transluce-san-francisco-afzb68nfx83b) — San Francisco, CA