Conceptual Reasoning Researcher (Contract)

Trajectory Labs is looking for a Conceptual Reasoning Researcher. You'll design evaluations of conceptual reasoning in AI safety — hard, open-ended problems in AI governance, alignment, macrostrategy, and economics, each paired with a rubric that separates real reasoning from plausible-sounding filler. Work 20–40+ hours a week, remotely or alongside the team at Constellation in Berkeley.

• Find hard conceptual questions in AI safety — alignment, macrostrategy, economics, governance — where frontier models still reason badly
• Turn each into an evaluation task: a well-posed problem and an opinionated rubric that rewards excellent reasoning and penalizes slop
• Run your tasks against frontier models and iterate until the scores separate strong answers from plausible-sounding weak ones
• Give and take detailed QA — tasks ship after review, not on first draft

• Domain depth: you have produced original analysis on AI risk, alignment, macrostrategy, economics, or governance that you stand behind
• Articulable taste: you can say why one argument in your field is better than another, precisely enough to encode it in a rubric
• Calibration under pushback: you revise your judgment when the argument against it is good, and defend it with reasons when it isn't
• Agent-native research: you work fluently with frontier models and agentic tools — you get real leverage from Claude Code or similar in your own work, and can tell the difference between output that is correct and output that merely sounds right
• Desirable: PhD-level research experience, experience writing grading rubrics or exam questions, peer-reviewed or widely-cited work in AI safety domains, experience using frontier models to answer messy questions

Apply directly to Trajectory Labs. Contact Ryan Carey (MTS, Head of Conceptual Reasoning) or visit the Trajectory Labs website for application instructions.