The AI Security Institute is the largest team in the government dedicated to understanding AI capabilities and risks in the world.
Our mission is to equip governments with an empirical understanding of the safety of advanced AI systems. We conduct research to understand the capabilities and impacts of advanced AI and develop and test risk mitigations.
We focus on risks with security implications, including the potential of AI to assist with the development of chemical and biological weapons, how it can be used to carry out cyber-attacks, enable crimes such as fraud, and the possibility of loss of control.
The risks from AI are not sci-fi; they are urgent. By combining the agility of a tech start-up with the expertise and mission-driven focus of government, we’re building a unique and innovative organisation to prevent AI’s harms from impeding its potential.
Role Description
The AI Security Institute's Research Unit is looking for motivated and talented Software Engineers to join AISI's Core Technology Team.
We are looking for exceptional candidates at all experience levels, from junior through to senior or staff, to work in small teams on a range of critical research-oriented software and infrastructure.
In this role, you’ll work with cutting-edge technologies on research problems with real-world impact, and receive mentorship and coaching from your manager and the technical leads on your team.
You'll also regularly interact with world-famous researchers and other incredible staff (including alumni from Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, Apple, and professors from Oxford and Cambridge).
About our Core Technology Team
AISI Core Technology Team comprises several teams building tools and infrastructure used across all of our research work.
This includes projects like Inspect (our open-source evaluation framework), systems for running evaluations at scale, and hosting frontier open-weights models for evaluations or human studies.
As a software engineer on one of these teams, you might:
- Add a feature to one of our “sandbox plugins” for Inspect, supporting advanced agentic evals with safe mechanisms to let models write and execute arbitrary code
- Implement support for a new class of open-weights model on our model hosting platform
- Support a research team in designing custom infrastructure for a new research project
- Collaborate with the open-source community on a feature in Inspect or Inspect's plugin ecosystem
- Assist with an evaluation testing exercise of a frontier AI model, debugging issues that appear in Inspect from API changes in the lab's latest SDK
Person Specification
You may be a good fit if you have some of the following skills, experience and attitudes:
- Writing production-quality code at a fast pace.
- Designing, shipping, and maintaining complex tech products.
- Improving technical standards across a team through mentoring and feedback.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Experience working with a world-class research team comprised of both scientists and engineers (e.g. in a top-3 lab).
- Python experience, including understanding the intricacies of the language, the good vs. bad Pythonic ways of doing things and much of the wider ecosystem/tooling.
- Experience building and maintaining systems on AWS or other cloud providers using infrastructure-as-code.
Motivated candidates are encouraged to apply even if they don't meet all the above criteria.
Required Experience
We select based on skills and experience regarding the following areas:
- Writing production-quality code
- Writing code efficiently
- Python
- Written communication
- Verbal communication
- Teamwork
- Interpersonal skills
- Tackling challenging problems
Desired Experience
We additionally may factor in experience with particular areas, like:
- Expertise in Cloud Infrastructure or DevOps (AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, CDK, Docker, etc.)
- Cybersecurity expertise
- ML Ops (vLLM, agent frameworks, fine-tuning, RAG systems, etc.)
Salary & Benefits
We are hiring individuals at all ranges of seniority and experience within this research unit, and this advert allows you to apply for any of the roles within this range. Your dedicated talent partner will work with you as you move through our assessment process to explain our internal benchmarking process.
The full range of salaries is available below. Salaries comprise a base salary, technical allowance, plus additional benefits as detailed on this page.
- Level 3 - Total Package £65,000 - £75,000 inclusive of a base salary £35,720 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £29,280 - £39,280
- Level 4 - Total Package £85,000 - £95,000 inclusive of a base salary £42,495 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £42,505 - £52,505
- Level 5 - Total Package £105,000 - £115,000 inclusive of a base salary £55,805 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £49,195 - £59,195
- Level 6 - Total Package £125,000 - £135,000 inclusive of a base salary £68,770 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £56,230 - £66,230
- Level 7 - Total Package £145,000 inclusive of a base salary £68,770 plus additional technical talent allowance of £76,230
There is a range of pension options available, which can be found through the Civil Service website.
This role sits outside of the DDaT pay framework, given the scope of this role requires in-depth technical expertise in frontier AI safety, robustness and advanced AI architectures.
Selection Process
In accordance with the Civil Service Commission rules, the following list contains all selection criteria for the interview process.
