Clinical Research Scientist, Mental Health AI

About the Role

We’re looking for a Clinical Research Scientist to help lead and expand our work evaluating AI systems in mental health and other clinically sensitive settings.

As people increasingly use AI for emotional support, health information, and guidance during periods of distress, we need better ways to determine whether these systems respond safely and appropriately. Many important risks emerge over the course of a conversation, including missed signs of escalating distress, reinforcement of harmful beliefs, diagnostic overreach, and unhealthy emotional dependence.

You’ll work closely with our existing research team and engineers to build clinically grounded benchmarks, realistic multi-turn scenarios, scoring criteria, and validation studies. You’ll help define what safe and unsafe model behavior looks like and ensure our evaluations reflect meaningful clinical risks.

This role is a strong fit for a clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, or clinical scientist who wants to help shape a growing research program in mental health AI evaluation while maintaining active academic and clinical collaborations.

What You’ll Do

- Lead the clinical design of evaluations for AI systems used in mental health and other sensitive domains.

- Identify important clinical failure modes and translate them into realistic scenarios and clear scoring criteria.

- Design studies to validate evaluation methods, including clinician review, inter-rater reliability, and comparisons with real-world interaction data.

- Work with psychologists, psychiatrists, researchers, and academic collaborators to develop rigorous benchmarks.

- Partner with technical researchers and engineers to implement evaluations at scale.

- Analyze model behavior, publish findings, and help shape our broader research agenda.

What We Offer

- Significant ownership over the direction of our mental health AI research

- Close collaboration with clinical, technical, and research colleagues

- Strong technical support and resources for large-scale studies

- Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and title flexibility based on experience

- Relocation and transportation support

- Health and dental insurance

- Lunch and dinner provided, plus snacks, coffee, and drinks

- Unlimited PTO

Further Reading:

- Hugging Face blog on evaluation

- Anthropic’s blog on challenges in evaluation

- New York Times article on issues in benchmarking

- Stanford HAI report showing hallucinations in legal tech tools