Tips for Cracking the AI Safety Technical Interview
About the authors // Yong is an ML researcher and former Astra Fellow. Joseph is a Research Program Manager at Constellation, the nonprofit that runs the Astra Fellowship and other AI safety programs. This post reflects our personal opinions, not those of any organization.There's excellent prep materials out there for traditional technical interviews, product/program/project interviews, and coding tests—and a real gap in guidance for researchers going through an AI safety-specific interview for the first time. This post aims to fill that gap.This post is for you if you're already in an interview pipeline for an AI safety role. It's not a guide to landing the interview. This post is not specific to independent safety orgs or frontier labs, but is intended to be broadly useful across the spectrum of full time AI safety role interviews. Interview processes vary significantly by org and teamThe first thing to know: AI safety interviews are not standardized the way traditional software engineering interviews are. Each organization, and often each team within an organization, often has its own approach. Some organizations only have one or two rounds being safety-focused, whereas some have the entire pipeline evaluating your AI safety knowledge and expertise.First, you should explicitly ask how to best prepare for the interviews. Many recruiters will happily provide you with the guidelines. Another highly useful thing you can do is talk to people who've been through it. If you’ve gotten to the interview stage, you’ve already passed through the biggest resume screening filters. That’s a meaningful signal that you’re in the running for the role. We expect people who could advise you to respond to these requests far more often than if you’re asking how to get through a resume screen stage. Reach out to researchers at the org you're interviewing with and ask for 15 minutes. Try your university alumni networks, LinkedIn second-degree connections (ask a direct connection for a w