Location: Fully remote, overlap with EU time zones required; strong preference for Europe-based.
Type: Full-time. We expect to make more than one hire for this role.
Compensation: $130,000–200,000 gross per year, flexible by experience and adjusted for cost of living.
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Apart Research is hiring a Research Scientist for Manipulation Evals to design, build, and publish novel evaluations of AI harmful manipulation that directly inform EU AI Act enforcement.
Why this role matters. From August 2026 the EU AI Office can fine frontier labs up to 3% of global annual turnover for deploying manipulative AI. To act, it needs its own credible evidence of serious concern (AI Act Art. 92–93), but the AI Act leaves the evaluation method to the "state of the art", which for many risk scenarios does not yet exist. The Office is severely capacity-constrained, so it relies on outside evaluation capacity, and Apart is one of the few organizations building it.
What counts as "harmful manipulation" here is still open, and you help define it. You set the direction: choose which risks are most important and tractable, then build evals credible enough that the Office can act on them. The quality bar is high, because weak evidence invites backlash and the wrong focus wastes scarce regulatory attention.
You report to Apart's Director of Research and work day-to-day with the division's Technical Project Manager. The division's work is independent but informed by direct conversation with EU AI Office staff.
About Apart Research. Apart is a globally distributed AI safety research lab. We're standing up a Research Division to build independent harmful-manipulation evaluations for the EU AI Office ahead of EU AI Act enforcement. We've co-authored with the EU AI Office in Science, contributed to the EU AI Act Code of Practice across three of its four Working Groups, sit on the AI Act Advisory Forum, and assembled the consortium (Apart, CeSIA, Equistamp, Transluce, FAR.AI) that won the AI Office's evaluation tender on harmful manipulation (36 months).
Over the last three years, we have also run 50+ global AI safety research hackathons with 6,000+ participants, have worked with 120+ research fellows, and published 30+ peer-reviewed AI-safety papers, including spotlights at top conferences.