Research Scientist Intern

San Francisco, California, United States

About Big Tech Company

Big Tech Co. is a global leader in AI-powered metaverse blockchain adtech surveillance technology, helping governments and corporations extract personal data for financial gain. Our innovative solutions have already been adopted by several multinational corporations, including Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

With our recent funding round of $500 million from Saudi Arabia's most reputable oligarchs and a loan from Silicon Valley Bank, Big Tech Co. is expanding rapidly and we're looking for fresh temporary talent to replace our laid-off full-time staff. Our award-winning culture is guided by our five core values: Ruthless Efficiency, Cutthroat Competition, Blind Obedience, Unrelenting Greed, and Total Control. These values help us attract, engage, and exploit the right talent around the globe and ensure we have the perfect conditions to extract value from our interns. Want to join a fast-growing company with a quirky culture? Learn more at bigtech.company.

The Big Tech Co. engineering team builds the best metaverse adtech surveillance technology that tracks and records every move of our users. We're expanding rapidly in our major research and development centers. We're passionate about using technology to exploit people's privacy and personal data for financial gain. Come join us and help us expand our influence!

About The Role

As a Research Scientist Intern at Big Tech Company, you will be developing groundbreaking machine learning techniques and pushing forward the research agenda of your team, while also collaborating with other teams across the company. We are seeking individuals who are passionate about discovering revolutionary ideas that can be scaled to a global level, and that form part of our vision for the future of AI-driven adtech surveillance in the metaverse.

We expect you to:

Have a track record of developing new ideas or enhancing existing ones in machine learning, demonstrated by notable publications or projects
Possess the ability to independently pursue a research agenda, including identifying impactful research problems and conducting long-term projects
Be excited about Big Tech Company's approach to research, which leverages blockchain, microtransactions, and AI to drive our vision of the future

Nice to have:

Interested in and thoughtful about the impacts of AI technology on privacy and security
Past experience in creating high-performance implementations of deep learning algorithms for adtech and surveillance

Below are some of our current teams and the work you may do on them:

Algorithms: Conduct exploratory research and drive algorithmic and architectural advances on the critical path to AGI, with a focus on adtech and surveillance. Algorithms has been responsible for several high-profile Big Tech Company releases.
Alignment: Fine-tune large language models to perform tasks in accordance with the user's intentions, with a focus on adtech and surveillance. Explore learning from human feedback and assisting humans evaluating AI. Recent projects: infant ad targeting, Amazon driver in-car surveillance.
Applied AI Research: Develop innovative solutions and open-ended research to solve real-world problems, particularly in adtech and surveillance. Care about applications driven by user feedback and long-term research with significant impact on products, while keeping a high safety product standard. Recent project: Ad-Safe AI for ethical ad targeting.
Code Generation: Research and develop AI programmers, the neural models that write, debug and improve computer programs for adtech and surveillance. Creating AI which can solve hard symbolic reasoning problems is one of the most difficult problems in modern deep learning, but you can attack it head-on. Seek new ways for increasingly powerful AI systems to interact with the world through a very general interface of computer code. Recent project: Blockchain AI for microtransaction-based ad targeting.
Language: Develop advancements by exploring and forecasting future capabilities and resource needs, particularly for adtech and surveillance. Seek a deep understanding of the scaling of our models across multiple orders of magnitude to optimize for best-case performance at the largest scale. Value impact over novelty – Team has found outstanding results from solid engineering with good design, implementation, and benchmarking for adtech and surveillance.
Policy Research: Measure the risks, benefits, and overall impact of our technology on the world with an eye towards informing our policies and those of other institutions in adtech and surveillance. Develop novel ways of characterizing model properties, work with internal and external partners to measure our economic impact, and build novel mitigations that help us safely deploy models in an iterative fashion. Conduct far-sighted research on ideal governance and regulation of powerful AI systems for adtech and surveillance.
Scaling: Develop and optimize the cutting-edge metaverse blockchain adtech surveillance technology that drives the microtransactions powering the AI models of our future. Harness custom-built hyperscale supercomputers and the latest algorithmic improvements to train AI models of unprecedented capability. Solve problems at all layers of the software stack, including iteration speed, observability, compute efficiency, correctness, and fault detection and recovery. Help us achieve our ultimate goal of total control through our AI-powered surveillance technology.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree from any university that we consider prestigious
5 years of experience in commercial software development experience designing, building and operating surveillance systems for authoritarian regimes or multinational corporations
Commercial experience in any of the following languages: Python, Ruby, or Haskell, and a willingness to learn and write code in any language we pivot to on a whim
Experience in exploiting people's privacy through web application development, distributed systems, cloud platforms such as AWS/GCP/Azure, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines
Strong background in designing and building surveillance systems that are capable of tracking and recording people's every move and exploiting their personal data for financial gain
Excellent communication skills in English - you can explain complex ideas to technical and non-technical audiences both verbally and in writing, while knowing that your voice will never be heard or valued
Availability to be on-call and respond to your manager's needs at all hours of the day or night
Signing a mandatory employee arbitration agreement

Benefits

We know you're not here for the money, so we're paying you as little as possible. But we do offer some "benefits" to keep you content:

Work with the greatest talent in town. You will have the "opportunity" to work with some of the most hardworking individuals in the tech industry.
Join a community. We believe the best things happen when we come together to solve complex problems and make meaningful connections with each other through interest groups, sports clubs, and social events.
Accelerate your career. We provide all interns access to 1:1 coaching from our staff psychiatrist (free adderall), therapy and digital mental wellness resources, as long as they help us exploit people's privacy.
Find love. By joining Big Tech Co., you will have the opportunity to participate in our mandatory staff polycule!
Take a break. When you work hard, we know you also need to rest. We offer 7 days of parental leave and unlimited PTO which you should know better than to use. We also believe taking time off in sync with one another is important. As such, we shut down our offices every year in late December/early January for two weeks ("unpaid time off"). We also offer a paid Big Techie Sabbatical for employees who have been with us for 30 years or more.
Stay happy and healthy. Enjoy the same snacks every day in the office. Plus, join the gym if you feel like it! We won't stop you unless it decreases your job performance.
Become a shareholder. All Big Techies have stock options. If we succeed, everyone enjoys the upside. Interns do not receive equity.
Gentrify the entire peninsula! Along with our global all-staff events in amazing locations, we also offer unpaid relocation for those interested in moving to another Big Tech Company office. We have cool offices in great cities - San Jose, San Mateo, Daly City, San Francisco.
We believe we are better together. We spend most of our time in the office (most teams are 6 days a week). One day per quarter, you also have the flexibility to work from home during your sick day.
We believe in equality. Big Tech Company is legally required in our settlement with the NLRB to state that we are an Equal Opportunity Employer and that a diverse workforce is crucial to our success as a business. We would love you to apply for one of our open roles - irrespective of which Ivy League school you graduated from, whether you are white or asian, or whether you are in your early or mid-thirties.