Who we are

Quantum Leap is building the world's best system for rapidly acquiring expertise. Our first courses will be on large language models and AI safety, for which we’re aiming to compress a PhD and several years’ experience into 3-6 months using accelerated learning methods developed by the US military.

About our founder

Michael Webb is an economist, policymaker, and scientist, and the founder of Quantum Leap. He was previously a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, the UK Prime Minister’s top adviser on science, technology, and education (where he pioneered the HPI visa, among other policies), a leading researcher in the economics of innovation and AI, a co-author of “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, and, at age 19, a war correspondent for The Economist in Afghanistan. He has degrees from Oxford, MIT, and Stanford.

• Click to view: 🎤 Stripe's Patrick Collison interviews Michael (KV Summit 2018) 💬

• Listen to Michael's recent 80,000 Hours podcast interview on the impacts of AI on the economy.

What you’ll do

We’re looking for a Founding Learning Engineer to lead our efforts on accelerated pedagogy. Your job will be to invent and test scalable ways to accelerate students’ acquisition of real-world expertise in large language models and AI safety.

Reporting directly to the founder/CEO, you’ll work as part of a small team that also consists of:

• A software engineer, responsible for the technical infrastructure for our learning experiments, and for the software implementation of our prototypes; and
• An operations lead, responsible for recruiting pilot students, experiment logistics, and all other operational matters.

In the first 6 months, you’ll:

• Work with the world’s top AI scientists and engineers to understand their expertise;
• Pick a small number of expert skills to target for our first learning experiments;
• Design assessments that quantify student progress on these skills; and
• Most importantly, create prototypes of accelerated learning techniques, educational content, and scalable delivery methods that target these skills.

After that, you’ll:

• Help design the end-to-end student experience for longer programs;
• Prototype and iterate methods to scale up content creation and course delivery, using a mix of AI and human teams;
• Develop evidence-gathering systems to improve our ability to accelerate students up the experience curve; and
• Scale our system globally, redefining the way humans acquire expertise and unlocking talent everywhere.

Who you are

This is an unusual role, and we think great candidates could come from a wide variety of backgrounds.

The only prerequisites to apply are:

• you want to build real-world learning systems that will supercharge some of the world’s most high-potential people;
• you have a strong interest in AI;
• you’re exceptionally curious;
• you have minute attention to detail, and are comfortable with having your work critiqued extensively by others and reworking it several times over to make it excellent; and
• you’re excited to learn from experiments on real students and to iterate extremely quickly.

Beyond that, there are no minimum qualifications. If the above sounds like you then we strongly encourage you to apply.

You’d be a particularly good fit if:

1) You’ve created pedagogical content and/or built real-world learning technologies

At the more experienced end, you may have:

• created pedagogical content in the spirit of Quantum Country, 3blue1brown, Explanaria, Napkin, or Distill;
• applied learning and motivation science to build and iterate real-world learning systems;
• conducted Cognitive Task Analysis or other kinds of expert interviews;
• developed technologies focused on training perceptual knowledge or procedural skills; and/or
• worked on pedagogical applications of LLMs such as Khanmigo.

At the less experienced end, you may have:

• experimented extensively with using ChatGPT/Claude for your own pedagogical purposes;
• engaged deeply with the kinds of pedagogical content mentioned above;
• a strong interest in learning science and/or assessment design; and/or
• been a successful instructor, tutor, or TA for technical courses.

2) You have real-world experience of machine learning, particularly LLMs/AI safety

At the more experienced end, you may have:

• worked as a machine learning engineer or research scientist at an AI lab, tech company, or AI safety research organisation.

At the less experienced end, you may have:

• taken online courses such as fast.ai, DeepLearning.AI, Stanford’s CS224N, or Berkeley’s CS 285; and/or
• participated in a bootcamp like MLAB or ARENA.

What if I don’t fit this description?

We encourage you to apply even if you think it’s only 2% likely you could be a great fit. This is an unusual role, and we expect many strong candidates to have very different backgrounds to those sketched out above. The most important prerequisites are a passion for pedagogy and for AI. If you're strong in one area but have minimal experience with the other, that's fine — we can provide on-the-job training to fill any skills gaps.

We're committed to giving all candidates the opportunity to demonstrate their potential during the application process. We’re confident in our ability to spot outstanding candidates — especially if your career has taken some extraordinary twists and turns, or if you’re only just getting started.

We encourage speculative applications from those not currently looking for a new role but curious about the opportunity.

We welcome diverse perspectives. We encourage people from all backgrounds to apply, especially women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and those from non-western countries.

Location and compensation

Quantum Leap is headquartered in London. Your team will either be in-person in London (with some hybrid working) or remote-first. We accept applications from all countries.

Compensation will depend on your experience and your location.

Apply for this role

The application process consists of four stages:

• Stage 1: Initial application (<10 minutes).
• Stage 2: Call with Quantum Leap’s founder (15-30 mins) + short written exercise (1-2 hours).
• Stage 3: Final round interviews and paid work sample test (~1-3 days).
• Stage 4: Reference checks.

After you submit your initial application, we'll get back to you within 10 days.

We are considering applications on a rolling basis, so encourage you to apply as soon as possible.

If you have any problems accessing the application form (a link to the form should be displayed immediately above this text), would like to request accommodations for any stage of the process, or have any other questions, please do get in touch with us directly at joinus@quantumleap.education.

Once again, if in doubt, please apply. We look forward to receiving your application!

Our culture

Core beliefs

• Education can be so much better. We believe it’s possible to radically accelerate learning, to give people everywhere access to the world’s most cutting-edge knowledge and expertise, and to do so through compelling, scalable experiences that are effective, affordable, and high signal for employers.
• We will make it happen. We believe that the ambitious, energetic, and deliberate efforts of a small band of people can have an outsize impact on the world.

Core values

• Treat others as we’d wish to be treated ourselves. Our work is fundamentally about people, relationships, and human connection. We live each day with deep empathy and care for our students, for our partners, and, most importantly, for each other.
• Learning as life-or-death. We obsess over how to accelerate students up the experience curve, and go to great lengths to discover or invent the approaches that actually work.
• Insanely high standards. We obsess over every detail. We invent, reinvent, and simplify in the pursuit of excellence. We push ourselves to get better every single day.
• See reality clearly and make good decisions fast. We think rigorously, seek out points of view that make us feel uncomfortable, and update quickly. We move fast on imperfect information. We confront hard choices without flinching.
• Iterate at light speed. We rapidly invent, prototype, and experiment, always looking to gain maximum information for minimum cost. We invest in fast feedback loops. We are bold and fail often. We happily admit mistakes and learn from them.

At Quantum Leap, we are all:

• Intellectually broad and insatiably curious. We look for people who have gone deep in multiple domains, and who possess the creativity to make connections across disciplines. We look for wide-ranging curiosity, humility, and a desire to learn from others.
• High energy. We look for people with an effusion of positive sensibility, infectious optimism, and a playful spirit.
• High output. We look for builders who want to pour their hearts into our mission, work very long hours, and get lots done fast. We want people who will proactively identify the most important challenges, roll up their sleeves, and dive in deep.
• Collectively self-improving. We look for auto-didacts who want to grow as fast as possible and to help each other to do so. We want people who will continuously learn what’s needed, teach what they know to others, and invite and share candid feedback.
• Tenacious. We look for people who recognise that failure is a necessary part of progress, who run towards problems instead of away from them, and who always stay the course.