# Mark Keavney > AI Safety Researcher Location: San Jose, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/markkeavney Exceptional hands-on UX leader with 20+ years of experience, now applying human-centered design expertise to AI safety and alignment research. Key strengths: • AI Safety Focus: Currently pursuing intensive study in AI alignment and safety research • Research-oriented: PhD in Psychology with a strong foundation in experimental design and statistics • Experienced: 20+ years in product design, with a deep understanding of design principles and best practices • Specialized in SaaS: 7 years solving large-scale, complex UX problems for enterprises • Leader: 7 years building and mentoring high-performing teams • Communicator: Award-winning presenter, with ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts • Cross-functional: Strong track record of shipping great product in fast-moving, collaborative environments Current focus: Bridging user-centered design thinking with AI safety research to ensure AI systems are aligned with human values and needs. keavney.mark@gmail.com • (650)796-0925 • markkeavney.com ## Work Experience ### Team Member @ AI Safety Camp Jan 2026 – Present | San Jose, California, United States Collaborating on team project “Computational Modeling of Parasocial Attachments and Social Simulation”. ### Research Fellow @ Supervised Program for Alignment Research Jan 2025 – Present • Selected as one of 300+ mentees from 1600 applicants in the largest AI alignment research program in the world. • Conducted extensive literature review on LLMs’ “theory of mind”, critical for understanding AI deception capabilities. • Co-designed novel game-based paradigm to measure new aspects of LLM theory of mind. • Co-developed Python code to test dozens of different LLMs through OpenRouter API. • Executed 4680 trials across 6 frontier models (Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5, Gemini 3, Llama 405B) and 39 scenario types. • Analyzed data and discovered key results with implications for real-world safety scenarios. ### AI Safety and Alignment Research - Independent Study @ Unknown Jan 2025 – Present | San Jose, California, United States Self-directed intensive study program on AI safety, with emphasis on technical research applications. Independent research project: • Designed and executed experiment testing hypothesis that LLMs learn misaligned behaviors from sci-fi "rogue AI" tropes in training data • Ran 400 trials in a 2x2 experimental design with ChatGPT5 and Claude Sonnet 4 using OpenAI and Anthropic APIs. • Implemented automated LLM scoring system with 93% inter-rater reliability. • Published research on LessWrong: “Misalignment and Roleplaying: Are Misaligned LLMs Acting Out Sci-Fi Stories?” (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LH9SoGvgSwqGtcFwk/misalignment-and-roleplaying-are-misaligned-llms-acting-out) Leadership: • Co-organizer, then Lead Organizer, for the BlueDot AI Safety Evals Reading Group (https://evalsreadinggroup.com), with ~50 attendees each week. Presented, led discussions, arranged author presentations, planned strategy. Coursework and reading: • Completed foundational AI coursework, including "AI for Everyone" (Coursera), "AI Essentials for User Experience Designers" (LinkedIn Learning), and “The Future of AI” (BlueDot.org) • Completed specialized courses ”AI alignment” (BlueDot.org). “Practical Deep Learning for Coders” (fast.ai), “Machine Learning Crash Course” (Google), and “UI/UX Design for AI Products” (Stanford University). • Engaged in extensive self-study of AI alignment literature, including academic papers and industry research. • Earned certification in Python from Learnx.org. • Fine-tuned and deployed model for predicting LLM response safety (https://huggingface.co/spaces/keavney/LLMSafetyClassifier). ### Director of Product Design @ Clumio Jan 2020 – Jan 2024 | Santa Clara, California, United States Led design at Clumio, a software startup doing enterprise backup for AWS. • Oversaw the delivery of high-quality UX designs for dozens of projects, including new flagship products used by Atlassian and Duolingo to back up petabytes of data and tens of billions of S3 objects. • Contributed to Clumio’s outstanding net promoter score of 86. Ease of use one of our top selling points and was routinely cited as a competitive advantage by our sales force. • Annual revenue grew from <$1M to $25M during the time I was leading the UX team. Built a world-class UX design team: • Hired 7 designers with skills strategic for the business in a tight job market. Team retention was 100%. • Established leveling and career tracks for UX job roles. Every designer understood the expectations of their role and had SMART performance goals. • Built team spirit by coaching and mentoring employees. My team had a CultureAmp employee engagement score of 100 (overall company score was 64). Established processes and best practices that led the team to excel: • Increased productivity by streamlining UX tool use from three different tools to one and creating a rich Figma design system library of complex branded components and page templates. • Ensured consistency by creating a complete set of design system guidelines with foundational elements like color and typography, usage rules and code samples for each component, voice and tone standards, and UX patterns. • Established accountability by setting up a formal UX development process that integrated into Clumio’s software development lifecycle. • Improved quality by Integrating user research into all aspects of the design process, from analytics to understand product use, foundational user interviews to discover user needs, and usability testing to measure success. ### Product Design Consultant @ Excursions Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 Designed consumer-facing UI for travel application ### Interaction Design Lead @ Intel Corporation Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Santa Clara • Drove product strategy with designs of e-reader and Learning Management System integration. • Drove acceptance of new UX paradigm for analytics product across the organization. • Designed administration console for managing DRM for hundreds of thousands of devices in international deployments. • Conducted research on K-12 teachers: site visits, in-house interviews, and a multi-lingual survey of over 100 teachers in the UK, China, Japan, and Spain. Redesigned web analytics product for teachers to focus on user needs revealed by research. ### Principal User Experience Designer @ SuccessFactors Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 | South San Francisco, California, United States Led UX for multiple modules in SaaS HR suite with 4000+ enterprise customers, 15 million users: • Managed two interaction designers and directed the work of others. • Led four interaction designers in the redesign of People Profile, which integrated information from 20+ different HR modules into a graphical, customizable, responsive design that worked across multiple roles and permissions. • Home page redesign was showcased in keynote at global SuccessConnect conferences; attendees called it “absolutely amazing”, “leaves [competition] in the dust”, “WOW”. • Quick turnaround Recruiting design saved anchor client with 420K employees (Siemens). • Designed first native mobile interface for Learning module. ### Staff User Experience Designer @ Intuit Jan 2007 – Jan 2011 Led the design of multiple small-business payroll products: • Designed next-generation online payroll product from scratch. Product received 4.6/5-star customer reviews: “easy to user and understand”, “very well-designed”, “light years simpler”. • Designed “seamless”, “exceptionally easy to navigate and use” UI for QuickBooks export, according to Accounting Technology. • Designs increased average task success rates from 30% to 90%, as measured by user testing. • Customers raved about new interface: “modern, intuitive, user-friendly, and aesthetically-pleasing”, “so much better”, “so much easier to run a payroll automatically”. ### User Experience Manager @ Intuit Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 Managed a team of user experience designers and a researcher in creating personal finance software: • Oversaw a sophisticated “real data” test that allowed us to get feedback from users seeing their actual bank transactions in a fully functional prototype, six months before launch. • Successfully evangelized user-centered development to Intuit's partner and largest acquisition, Digital Insight. ### Senior User Experience Designer @ Intuit Jan 2003 – Jan 2005 ### Senior User Experience Designer @ Lavastorm Engineering Jan 2000 – Jan 2003 Sole UX designer for dozens of projects at web consulting firm, including: • HP Managed Print Portal: a large-scale system allowing HP technicians, customer service, and executives to view information from thousands of printers at client sites worldwide. • DICE: online job board design that included advanced features like bidirectional matching, user agents, and resume/job screening. ### User Experience Designer @ Decide.com Jan 1999 – Jan 2000 Designed and usability tested a telecommunications comparison and shopping site: • Site received favorable reviews from Time ("simpler and easier to navigate" [than the competition]), Newsweek, Money, NPR, and others. ## Education ### Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Psychology Stanford University ### Bachelor of Arts - BA in Psychology Cornell University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/markkeavney - Website: http://markkeavney.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/markkeavney JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/markkeavney/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-08