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Greater London, England, United Kingdom
Hybrid
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 (the Prime Minister's office), and we work with frontier developers and governments globally.
We’re here because governments are critical for advanced AI going well, and UK AISI is uniquely positioned to mobilise them. With our resources, unique agility and international influence, this is the best place to shape both AI development and government action.
The Human Influence (HI) team focuses on the ways in which AI can influence human beliefs, decisions, and behaviour. A substantial class of AI risk operates through people. AI systems can persuade people to change their beliefs and to take action; can build trusting relationships with people in order to exploit them; can extract private information from them; and can hold delegated ownership of high-stakes decisions.
Our work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods from computational social science, AI safety and security, cognitive and behavioural science, machine learning, and data science. Typical projects include running rigorous human-AI interaction studies and randomised controlled trials, building evaluations and benchmarks that track AI capabilities across model releases, eliciting model capabilities through fine-tuning and self-play, and developing datasets to monitor real-world risk exposure and severity.
We are looking for an Engineering Lead to manage and oversee a growing team of engineers. The team’s work includes: developing new evaluations and technical capability demonstrations, building robust data pipelines, driving world-leading research studies using complex multi-agent setups, finetuning LLMs (>100B parameters), and building custom Reinforcement Learning environments.
Projects the Engineering Lead might lead or deliver as individual contributor include:
This is a leadership role. Competitive candidates will be strong engineers with a track record of leading engineering projects from scoping to production. The Human Influence Engineering Lead will work with Human Influence team leadership and senior AISI stakeholders to develop and deliver an engineering roadmap for the Human Influence team, and will lead and grow the HI Engineering function, including managing Research and Software Engineers.
This is a multidisciplinary team, and successful candidates come from a wide range of backgrounds.
General:
Research and engineering:
We will review applications as they come in, so would encourage you to apply early. If you are interested in this role but do not yet have engineering leadership experience, you may want to consider our open Research Engineer position.
Impact you couldn't have anywhere else
Resources & access
Growth & autonomy
Life & family*
*These benefits apply to direct employees. Benefits may differ for individuals joining through other employment arrangements such as secondments.
Annual salary is benchmarked to role scope and relevant experience. Most offers land between £65,000 and £145,000 made up of a base salary plus a technical allowance (take-home salary = base + technical allowance). An additional 28.97% employer pension contribution is paid on the base salary.
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.
The full range of salaries are available below:
Artificial Intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
The Internal Fraud function of the Fraud, Error, Debt and Grants Function at the Cabinet Office processes details of civil servants who have been dismissed for committing internal fraud, or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned. The Cabinet Office receives the details from participating government organisations of civil servants who have been dismissed, or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned, for internal fraud. In instances such as this, civil servants are then banned for 5 years from further employment in the civil service. The Cabinet Office then processes this data and discloses a limited dataset back to DLUHC as a participating government organisations. DLUHC then carry out the pre employment checks so as to detect instances where known fraudsters are attempting to reapply for roles in the civil service. In this way, the policy is ensured and the repetition of internal fraud is prevented. For more information please see - Internal Fraud Register.
We may be able to offer roles to applicant from any nationality or background. As such we encourage you to apply even if you do not meet the standard nationality requirements (opens in a new window).