Product Manager / Engineering Manager

Company: Alignment Research Center
Location: Berkeley
Posted on: May 24, 2023

Job Description:

IntroductionThe evaluations project at the Alignment Research Center is a new team building capability evaluations (and in the future, alignment evaluations) for advanced ML models. The goals of the project are to improve our understanding of what alignment danger is going to look like, understand how far away we are from dangerous AI, and create metrics that labs can make commitments around (e.g. 'If you hit capability threshold X, don't train a larger model until you've hit alignment threshold Y'). You can learn more about the project Job MissionThis role has two components - a product management and engineering management role. We're very much open to candidates who only do one of the components really well, although our ideal candidate would have skills for both.Both roles need to keep the big picture in mind and ensure we're making progress towards the long-term goal: as increasingly powerful models are created, we want to have tools that massively improve our ability to understand and evaluate these new models. This can either be by building tools that are robustly useful across a range of model capabilities, or ensuring we have a smoothly-running engine to rapidly produce the tools that are needed as we get acquainted with each new generation of models.Technical Product Management- Decide what tools we should build to help our research team evaluate models.- Serve as the interface between researchers and engineering team: understand user needs and decide what needs to be built.- Design and describe possible user interfaces.- Prioritize between improving our current tooling vs throwing things out and starting over.- Technical design.- Figure out what to spec and build in what order to get information and derisk approaches as rapidly as possible.Engineering Management- Support, mentor and grow our team of engineers.- Allocate tasks and structure codebases and workflows to minimize friction and maximize engineer productivity. - Plan and schedule the work for the engineering team, including prioritizing key features and coordinating dependencies between components.- Own hiring and growing the engineering team as needed to support our increasingly broad evaluations work.Skills and ExperienceBoth- Strong engineer: can accurately evaluate new potential eng hires, evaluate each engineers' contributions, review code and provide excellent feedback.- Founder mentality: will take ownership and make things go fast, doing whatever necessary along the way.- Scrappiness you have a track record of quickly spinning up projects and prototyping stuff rapidly.- Familiarity with webapps - you have personally built multiple projects.Technical Product Management- Eliciting user needs: Can talk to users (mostly highly technical and involved), come away with excellent understanding of their current needs and how things might change in the future.- Prioritization: can triage requests for features, prioritize, say "no" where necessary.- Can achieve product velocity: really talented at scoping down first versions of thingspays attention to how fast we're moving, actively thinks of ways we can stay fast or move faster.Engineering Management- Technical debt management: have worked on engineering projects large enough that they have experience strategically managing technical debt.- People management: can identify each team member's strengths and needs, catch and eliminate blockers and frictions, facilitate and encourage their growth.

Keywords: Alignment Research Center, Berkeley , Product Manager / Engineering Manager, Executive , Berkeley, California