Science and Technology Lead - Multi-Agent Security

Salary and Location: £70,000 – £105,000 per year, calibrated on benchmarked experience levels and selection criteria. Location: Kings X, London; Tuesday – Thursday at HQ, Monday & Friday remote.

About the Role: You’ll sit alongside Programme Director Alex Obadia and the Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space team, working on the Scaling Trust programme. You will be involved in every aspect of the programme’s technical management from design through approval, project selection, and delivery, and will support the broader Trust Everything, Everywhere opportunity space across the portfolio.

What You’ll Do:

• Act as the technical lead, with the Programme Director and their Programme Specialist, to shape and deliver a bold programme of research aimed at enabling AI agents, both embodied and digital, to coordinate with one another in untrusted settings.
• Review project proposals, grant applications, assess technical milestones, and stay close to the ground on what’s being built and tested by Creator teams.
• Plan, lead, and contribute to technical discussions in project meetings, workshops, and formal reviews, bringing depth, challenge, and direction to every interaction.
• Provide evidence-based technical insight to the Programme Director and the ARIA team to support high‑quality decisions and sharpen the programme’s strategic direction.
• Confidently communicate complex scientific ideas surrounding the programme to stakeholders, from government and funders to key players across the ecosystem.
• Contribute your technical prowess in application areas for robot locomotion (e.g., inspection & maintenance, construction, etc.) and other cutting‑edge capabilities within the program, amplifying its overall effectiveness.
• Identify emerging trends and surface the most promising technologies, people, and ideas across the programme and its surrounding opportunity space.
• Co‑author white papers, open calls, and technical reviews that articulate the ambition of the programme and set a clear, compelling vision for external communities.
• Work closely with the Programme Specialist and Creator teams to drive project delivery, tracking against ambitious technical milestones, benchmarking progress against the state of the art, and spotting opportunities for research cross‑pollination to sustain momentum.
• Provide continuity to the opportunity space, and maintain a deep understanding of past and present programmes, and Creator projects, to help new Programme Directors build on what has worked.

Connecting the Programme to the Ecosystem:

• Represent the programme, often on behalf of the Programme Director, at events, workshops and talks.
• Support the broader opportunity space by identifying and developing innovative ways to expand it, bringing in new ideas, talent, and opportunities that deliver long‑term value beyond the immediate needs of one programme.
• Build trusted relationships with world‑class researchers, labs, and founders working at the forefront of the programme’s focus area, as well as the broader opportunity space.
• Work closely with ARIA’s Activation Partners to ensure Creator teams can access the right tools, platforms, and networks to accelerate translation and achieve impact beyond ARIA’s direct reach.

Define and Cultivate ARIA’s Technical Culture:

• Collaborate across ARIA on funding models, budgets, tooling, and operational mechanisms to support effective, flexible funding and programme delivery.
• Contribute as a member of ARIA’s team of Science and Technology Leads, sharing best practices and learnings between programmes to strengthen ARIA’s overall portfolio of work.
• Identify opportunities to expand the opportunity space and build the connective tissue between adjacent spaces.
• Help build and sustain ARIA’s scientific and operational culture.

Who You Are:

• Strong technical foundations in physics, engineering, or similar, enabling you to understand complex systems and the constraints of the physical world.
• Proven experience in a building role, such as software/infrastructure engineer at an AI lab, an AI security startup, or a high‑level independent developer; personally written, tested, and shipped complex codebases or AI infrastructure.
• Demonstrable applied AI experience; have worked with or on AI and thought deeply about its implications.
• Experience in AI red‑teaming, formal verification, or security research, with a hacker’s intuition for identifying non‑obvious failure modes in agentic systems.
• Ability to interrogate a project at a granular level, evaluating technical feasibility of complex milestones from a first‑principles engineering perspective.
• Entrepreneurial mindset, willing to start new initiatives and think outside the box.
• Independent, able to reliably take projects from start to completion, manage them, and set high standards of excellence.
• Hungry and ambitious, pushing the team toward the biggest outcomes and setting personal big goals.
• Uncover non‑obvious opportunities and risks, connecting teams, ideas and research threads in novel ways that drive adoption and translation.
• Communication skills, articulate complex technical concepts and timelines clearly and confidently.
• Highly adaptable to uncertainty and fast‑paced environments.

• Experience in robotics, cryptography, or autonomous systems where digital agents interact with physical hardware/constraints.
• Track record of implementing theoretical findings into prototypes or tools, not just publishing papers.
• Experience in multi‑agent reinforcement learning, agentic game theory, or designing coordination mechanisms in untrusted environments.
• Familiarity with Scaling Trust primitives such as Trusted Execution Environments, Zero‑Knowledge Proofs, or programmable cryptography.
• Obsessed about niche and future technologies.
• Success in performing technical assignments that require unconventional or novel approaches.
• Strong working knowledge of the UK R&D ecosystem and how to activate relevant parts of it.

Qualifications: Scientific qualification, preferably a PhD in Physics, Maths, Engineering or similar, or other deep technical experience in one of the listed areas of interest (AI security, embodied AI, algorithmic game theory, etc.).

Benefits:

• 27 days annual leave provision, with the option to buy/sell additional days.
• Hybrid working arrangements; 60% in office / 40% at home.
• Supportive environment for learning and development opportunities.
• Enhanced family leave arrangements.
• A free and confidential 24/7 employee assistance programme.
• 2 days of paid volunteer days.
• 5% defined contribution pension scheme with Smart Pension.
• Cycle to Work scheme.
• Excellent office location in Kings X, London.

Application: We encourage a diverse range of candidates. Please use your cover letter to tell us about your interests and what you hope to bring to this role. If you require reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, let us know. You may be required to travel across the UK and internationally depending on the Programme you are designated to. ARIA adopts a considered approach to ethical and social responsibility and abides by the 3Rs principle.