Automation & Context Engineer
Build and maintain the LLM tools, connectors and workflows that speed up Iliad's operations and research, and keep the organisational context behind them accurate and up to date.
About Iliad
Iliad is a nonprofit dedicated to advancing foundational AI alignment research. Our research division is made up of several teams working on the mathematical and conceptual foundations of the field, including Learning Theory, Abstractions & Representations, Agency, and Scalable Oversight & Heuristic Arguments. Alongside our own research, we train new alignment researchers through the Iliad Intensive and the Iliad Fellowship, incubate research organizations and an academic journal, and run a range of conferences that bring together researchers working on the hardest problems in AI safety. We're a small and quickly growing team.
About the Role
- Sit with staff and researchers to understand their workflows, spot bottlenecks, and independently identify projects worth pursuing.
- Build and maintain LLM tools, connectors, and reusable workflows that help with everyday operations and research. Test their usefulness and reliability, investigate failures, and improve them as needs change.
- Help people learn effective LLM usage through practical guidance, including providing relevant context and checking outputs.
- Maintain clear, accessible organisational and research context for humans and models, drawing on documents, discussions, meeting notes, and research sources.
- Check sources, dates, and subsequent updates; distinguish proposals, decisions, promised actions, and verified current state. Resolve conflicting accounts with the people involved and make uncertainty explicit. We expect a significant part of this will be LLM assisted.
- Keep context useful over time: correct stale summaries, preserve links to supporting evidence, and test whether retrieval gives people accurate answers to their questions.
What We're Looking For
- Strong practical judgment about LLMs: where they help, how they fail, and how to assess their outputs in someone else’s workflow.
- Engineering ability to build, debug, integrate, and maintain useful tools, with attention to how people actually use them.
- Curiosity about research and willingness to learn enough of a project’s concepts and aims to represent it accurately.
- Careful sourcing and clear writing, with the discipline to check claims and preserve distinctions that matter for decisions.
- Initiative to find worthwhile work, follow through on it, and maintain both tools and context after the initial build.
Our benefits include:
- Time Off: 25 days paid vacation annually, plus local holidays.
- Flexible Working Hours: We're a distributed organization with employees in a variety of locations and offer flexible working hours.
- Team Retreats: We have occasional in-person team retreats in California and England.