"This role offers a unique opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge AI researchin Trust and Safety, with a particular focus on understanding and evaluating therisks of autonomous AI systems. You'll collaborate with researchers andpractitioners to advance the science of AI safety and translate research intopractical tools and approaches that support safer AI development and adoption.There is so much meaningful work ahead, and we're eager to build it together."

- Alyssa Lefaivre Škopac | Director, AI Trust and Safety

About Amii

One of Canada's three main institutes for artificial intelligence (AI) andmachine learning, our world-renowned researchers drive fundamental and appliedresearch at the University of Alberta (and other academic institutions),training some of the world's top scientific talent. Amii is a core partner inthe Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI). Our cross-functional teams workcollaboratively with Alberta-based businesses and organizations to build AIcapacity and translate scientific advancement into industry adoption andeconomic impact.

About the Role

The Applied Research Scientist will advance the understanding and safety ofincreasingly autonomous AI systems through research on agentic AI. The role willinvestigate key safety challenges, develop rigorous evaluation methods, andexplore approaches to improving system reliability, robustness, and oversight.

Reporting to the Director of AI Trust and Safety, the Applied Research Scientistwill lead research to understand, evaluate, and mitigate risks associated withagentic AI systems.

As AI systems evolve from responding to individual prompts to independentlyplanning,



making decisions, using tools, and executing complex tasks, recent safetychallenges are emerging. This role will advance scientific understanding oftheir challenges and develop practical approaches to addressing them.

Research will build on Amii's strengths, address critical gaps in the AI safetylandscape, and be informed by national and international research priorities.Outputs will include academic papers, whitepapers, conference presentations,open-source tools, and evaluation methodologies.

The position focuses on achieving excellence in three main accountabilities:

- Trust & Safety AI Research Projects
- Strategy & Applied Expertise
- Project Execution

Potential research focus areas may include:

- Agentic AI safety evaluations: Developing rigorous methodologies, benchmarks,and testing environments to assess the capabilities, risks, robustness, andreliability of increasingly autonomous AI systems, including their behaviouracross complex tasks and environments.
- Goal misgeneralization and unintended behaviours: Investigating how agenticsystems interpret and pursue objectives, including failures where behavioursdiverge from intended goals, instructions, or constraints.
- Oversight, monitoring, and control:



Exploring approaches to evaluating andimproving human oversight, monitoring, intervention, and control ofautonomous AI systems.
- Emerging agentic safety risks: Investigating novel safety challengesassociated with agentic AI, including failures arising from tool use,long-horizon tasks, interactions with external environments, and increasinglycomplex agent architectures.

These focus areas are intended to guide, rather than limit, the research agenda.We welcome candidates who bring new perspectives, methodologies, and researchquestions that could meaningfully advance the science of agentic AI safety.

Required Skills / ExpertiseKey Responsibilities:

- Develops and communicates a clear vision for how research projects contributeto the goals of the T&S; program at Amii, which may include applied industryprojects
- Proposes, develops and executes Trust & Safety research proposals, definingobjectives, scope, methodologies, evaluation approaches, and resource needs,with a particular focus on agentic AI safety.
- Develops and implements research experiments, evaluation pipelines, andenvironments, working with engineering colleagues where appropriate
- Identifies opportunities throughout the research process to translatefindings into practical evaluation tools, methodologies, frameworks, andapplications
- Authors and publishes peer-reviewed papers, whitepapers, and other scientificoutputs
- Evaluates results and emerging insights to refine research plans anddetermine whether to continue, pivot, or discontinue projects based onrese

📌 Applied Research Scientist (Edmonton)
🏢 Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute
📍 Edmonton