You will operate deep within the model stack to build the deterministic governance layer for enterprise AI. By leveraging mechanistic interpretability, you'll work directly with model internals—weights and activations—to enforce policy and prevent drift. This role transforms frontier research into production systems that make LLMs reliable for Fortune 500 institutions.
Machine Learning Engineer at CTGT, Inc.
Are you ready to move beyond prompt engineering and start probing the mechanics of model cognition? This Stanford-born AI governance startup is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer to build the deterministic control plane for the Fortune 500. Backed by Gradient Ventures and General Catalyst, you'll work directly with model weights and activations using mechanistic interpretability to make LLMs reliable and auditable. If you have deep PyTorch expertise and want to ship frontier research into high-stakes production environments, this is your chance to shape the future of enterprise AI safety.
About this role
Role overview
About the company
Despite massive investment in commercial AI, organizations often find that demonstrated value is elusive, primarily due to the non-deterministic risk inherent to generative models. CTGT is the deterministic governance layer that enables the most important global institutions to deploy AI workflows with confidence.
Born out of Stanford University research, we provide the control plane that makes it possible. A lightweight, model-agnostic system that enforces policy, prevents drift, and produces auditable decisions in real time. When benchmarked on HaluEval, the CTGT Policy Engine (paired with GPT-120B OSS) outperformed frontier models (Gemini 3 Pro Preview, Claude 4.5 Opus and 4.5 Sonnet) at drastically lower compute cost.
While we sit on the edge of AI research, CTGT brings frontier intelligence into real-world environments. We apply cutting-edge theory directly in production to make large language models more reliable, controllable, and performant in practice.
Our mission is to bring models to the level of performance and accountability required by the Fortune 500. By bridging the gap between LLM capabilities and domain-specific requirements, we unlock the true potential of generative AI to solve the most pressing problems in our world today.
What you'll do
What you will do
- Implement techniques like activation patching and control vectors to achieve targeted, repeatable improvements in model output.
- Design and optimize feature-level intervention systems that enable deterministic policy enforcement at inference time for commercial and open-source models.
- Build the evaluation and deployment loops required to ship interpretability-based changes reliably into complex enterprise environments.
Who you are
Who this is a fit for
- Possesses a deep mathematical foundation in Transformer architectures and PyTorch internals, with experience training or fine-tuning models beyond superficial augmentation.
- Demonstrates the ability to translate academic papers on mechanistic interpretability into robust, production-ready code.
- Exhibits an ownership mindset and technical curiosity, driven to solve the challenge of making non-deterministic models auditable and controllable.
Why this role
Why this role is remarkable
- Work at the intersection of frontier AI research and production environments, moving beyond simple prompting to influence the mechanics of model cognition.
- Join a high-pedigree team born out of Stanford research, backed by elite investors including Google’s Gradient Ventures and Y Combinator.
- Drive massive impact by building the core "Policy Engine" that enables the world's most important institutions to deploy generative AI with confidence.
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