Job Specifications
About The AI Security Institute
The AI Security Institute is the world's largest and best-funded team dedicated to understanding advanced AI risks and translating that knowledge into action. We're in the heart of the UK government with direct lines to No. 10, and we work with frontier developers and governments globally.
We're here because governments are critical for advanced AI going well, and AISI is uniquely positioned to mobilize them. With our resources and the UK government's unique agility and international influence, this is the best place to shape both AI development and government action.
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 with 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 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 you 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 Dev Ops (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 are available below, salaries comprise of a base salary, technical allowance plus additional benefits as detailed on this page.
Level 3 - Total Package PS65,000 - PS75,000 inclusive of a base salary PS35,720 plus additional technical talent allowance of between PS29,280 - PS39,280
Level 4 - Total Package PS85,000 - PS95,000 inclusive of a base salary PS42,495 plus additional technical talent allowance of between PS42,505 - PS52,505
Level 5 - Total Package PS105,000 - PS115,000 inclusive of a base salary PS55,805 plus additional technical talent allowance of between PS49,195 - PS59,195
Level 6 - Total Package PS125,000 - PS135,000 inclusive of a base salary PS68,770 plus additional technical talent allowance of between PS56,230 - PS66,230
Level 7 - Total Package PS145,000 inclusive of a base salary PS68,770 plus additional technical talent allowance of PS76,230
There are a range of pension options available which can