Vacancies

Senior Researcher in Interpretability and AI Safety

Research Grade 8: £49,119 - £58,265

Closes: 22 Sept 2026

The Technical AI Governance programme (Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford) is seeking a Senior Researcher in Interpretability and AI Safety. The post is funded by the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative.

The Senior Researcher will undertake research on Interpretability, evaluations and AI safety for continuously learning systems. They will evaluate systems whose behaviour keeps moving, and track, from the inside, whether the structures that carry their capabilities and safety properties hold up under the change.

The successful candidate will have completed a PhD in machine learning, computer science, or a closely related field and have research experience in at least one of: mechanistic or representational interpretability; model evaluation and benchmarking; continual or lifelong learning; or AI safety (alignment, scalable oversight, adversarial robustness). They will also have a strong publication record at relevant venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, or established AI safety venues and workshops) together with the ability to design, run, and make sense of large-scale experiments on foundation models.

The post is for 1 year fixed term and is full time, with the possibility of an extension for an additional year.

Only applications received before 12:00 noon (BST) on Tuesday 22nd September 2026 can be considered.

For more information about working at the Department of Engineering Science, see www.eng.ox.ac.uk/about/work-with-us/.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Fazl Barez at fazl.barez@eng.ox.ac.uk. 

---