Robert Kirk
PhD Candidate
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
SeniorRobert Kirk is a research scientist at the UK AI Safety Institute focused on safeguards and reducing catastrophic AI risk, drawing on a PhD from UCL in foundational AI where he studied LLM safety, RLHF and generalisation in reinforcement learning. He combines deep research experience with two years of prior software engineering, shipping backend systems in Python/Postgres, front-end React apps, and cloud infrastructure on k8s and AWS. His work includes industry research at Meta on RL vs imitation fine-tuning for LLMs and hands-on development of reward models and distributed training pipelines. Comfortable moving between theory and production, he has facilitated AGI safety education and reformed operational processes in student governance, showing appetite for practical governance as well as technical rigor. Based in London, he brings ten years of technical experience and a rare blend of mechanistic interpretability, fine-tuning expertise, and production engineering chops. An understated strength is his track record of translating safety research into reproducible, deployable tooling and training workflows.
10 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
13reputation
107reached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (86)
language-model10
hyperparameter-optimization10
deep-learning10
collaboration10
ai10
hyperparameter-tuning10
jax10
data-science10
reinforcement-learning10
data-versioning10
tensorflow10
pytorch10
machine-learning10
keras10
distributed-training9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
RobertKirk/roam-tools
May 2020 - Jun 2022
A small but growing collection of tools for Roam Research
Contributions:12 commits, 2 PRs, 7 pushes in 2 years
roamresearchpython3roamroamcult
RobertKirk/RobertKirk.github.io
Oct 2019 - Jun 2024
Contributions:12 PRs, 45 pushes, 3 branches in 4 years 8 months
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