"This role offers a unique opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge AI research
in Trust and Safety, with a particular focus on understanding and evaluating the
risks of autonomous AI systems. You'll collaborate with researchers and
practitioners to advance the science of AI safety and translate research into
practical 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) and
machine learning, our world-renowned researchers drive fundamental and applied
research at the University of Alberta (and other academic institutions),
training some of the world's top scientific talent. Amii is a core partner in
the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI). Our cross-functional teams work
collaboratively with Alberta-based businesses and organizations to build AI
capacity and translate scientific advancement into industry adoption and
economic impact.

About the Role

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

Reporting to the Director of AI Trust and Safety, the Applied Research Scientist
will lead research to understand, evaluate, and mitigate risks associated with
agentic AI systems.

As AI systems evolve from responding to individual prompts to independently
planning,



making decisions, using tools, and executing complex tasks, new safety
challenges are emerging. This role will advance scientific understanding of
their challenges and develop practical approaches to addressing them.

Research will build on Amii's strengths, address critical gaps in the AI safety
landscape, 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, and
reliability of increasingly autonomous AI systems, including their behaviour
across complex tasks and environments.

- Goal misgeneralization and unintended behaviours: Investigating how agentic
systems interpret and pursue objectives, including failures where behaviours
diverge from intended goals, instructions, or constraints.

- Oversight, monitoring, and control:



Exploring approaches to evaluating and
improving human oversight, monitoring, intervention, and control of
autonomous AI systems.

- Emerging agentic safety risks: Investigating novel safety challenges
associated with agentic AI, including failures arising from tool use,
long-horizon tasks, interactions with external environments, and increasingly
complex agent architectures.

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

Required Skills / ExpertiseKey Responsibilities:

-

- Develops and communicates a clear vision for how research projects contribute
to the goals of the T&S; program at Amii, which may include applied industry
projects

- Proposes, develops and executes Trust & Safety research proposals, defining
objectives, scope, methodologies, evaluation approaches, and resource needs,
with a particular focus on agentic AI safety.

- Develops and implements research experiments, evaluation pipelines, and
environments, working with engineering colleagues where appropriate

- Identifies opportunities throughout the research process to translate
findings into practical evaluation tools, methodologies, frameworks, and
applications

- Authors and publishes peer-reviewed papers, whitepapers, and other scientific
outputs

- Evaluates results and emerging insights to refine research plans and
determine whether to continue, pivot, or discontinue projec

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