Company
Bylaw
Annual salary
$185k – $250k/yr
Location
San Francisco, CA
Listed
18d ago
- Experience:
- 1 to 5 years
- Workplace:
- 5 days in-office in San Francisco, CA
- Equity:
- 0.25-3%
On-site in San Francisco, CA.
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About this Role
Founding Researcher
SAN FRANCISCO (IN PERSON)
What you'll do
- Design and run experiments across bylaw’s research agenda.
- Build evaluation environments, training pipelines, and runtime harnesses.
- Work with lawyers and our advisory board to ground research in real legal practice.
- Publish research and release benchmarks and tools.
What you need
- Degree in computer science, machine learning, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- One or more years of research or ML engineering experience, in industry, academia, or independent projects.
- Experience in AI safety, alignment, or evaluations, through publications, open-source projects, or industry work.
- Strong engineering skills in Python and the modern ML stack.
- Authorized to work in the US now and in the future without visa sponsorship; we are not able to sponsor visas at this time.
- A deep commitment to AI safety and to making AI follow the law.
- An excitement for tackling challenges with no predefined solution.
- A drive to move at startup pace without sacrificing rigor.
Nice to have
- Legal training, or research in law and computation.
- Experience training or validating LLM judges.
- Hands-on experience building evaluations, training environments, or post-training pipelines.
ABOUT BYLAW
AI agents are now taking actions in the real world, interacting with our financial markets, critical infrastructure, and democratic institutions. To fully realize AI’s potential and protect these systems, AI must follow the laws that underpin them. Today’s safety stack of evaluations, alignment, and runtime controls targets broad goals like helpfulness and preventing catastrophic misuse, but it fails to cover one imperative aspect of real-world safety: following the law.
Bylaw exists to fill this gap. We create evaluations that identify legal failure modes, training environments that reduce them, and runtime harnesses that guard against violations in production. Bylaw is backed by 8VC and Floodgate and is currently in stealth.
QUESTIONS YOU’LL WORK ON (TO NAME A FEW)
How do we turn court decisions, and the facts and reasoning they record, into realistic simulated environments, and generate new scenarios automatically from the rules they state?
How should agents reason across conflicting obligations, overlapping jurisdictions, and open-textured standards that leave room for discretion, such as "reasonable," "material," or "clear and conspicuous"?
How do we validate evaluations of legal compliance when the judge is itself a model, and how do we build labeled data from court decisions to train better judges?
WHAT YOU WILL DO IN YOUR FIRST YEAR
Lead a research project from design to publication.
Build legal evaluation environments and benchmarks grounded in real court decisions.
Develop labeled data and methods for training and validating LLM judges.
JOIN US
We are tackling a difficult problem, but one that, if solved, will enable humanity to harness the benefits of AI while staying in control. Founded by Christina Knight, former head of safety research at Scale AI and senior policy advisor at CAISI, bylaw is building a highly talented team of engineers, lawyers, and researchers who ask questions, explore uncertainty, and get hard things done.
APPLY
If you are interested in making AI safe in the real world, we would like to hear from you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I apply for the Founding Research Engineer (US) role at Bylaw? +
Use the Apply for a referral button on this page to send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role. They'll email you to check you're interested, then put you forward for this job or others that suit you better. It's free.
What does this Bylaw role pay? +
The listing gives $185k – $250k/yr.
Is this role remote? +
The listing gives the location as San Francisco, CA. 5 days in-office in San Francisco, CA.
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