Research Engineer-Scientist in England

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. With our resources, unique agility and international influence, this is the best place to shape both AI development and government action.

AISI's Chem Bio (CB) team conducts research to assess evolving AI capabilities related to science R&D and CB misuse, and the effectiveness of technical safeguards that might mitigate risks arising from those capabilities. The goal of our research is to inform critical decisions on security, opportunities, policy, and risk mitigation made by governments and AI developers. We're a close-knit, unusually interdisciplinary team – made up of machine learning researchers and engineers, software engineers, virologists and bacteriologists, behavioural research scientists, biosecurity experts, long-standing CB policy specialists and talented generalists – who work closely with other technical and policy teams across government.

This role also involves collaborating closely with AISI's Safeguards team, who evaluate the protections on current frontier AI systems and research what measures could better secure them in the future.

Role Responsibilities

• Lead ambitious research projects to understand the feasibility and effectiveness of potential technical safeguards for AI system's CB capabilities.
• Partner with frontier AI developers and the Safeguards team to rigorously assess and strengthen existing technical mitigations designed to reduce misuse of models' CB capabilities.
• Design, build and run evaluations that stress-test CB safeguards; analyse results and deliver clear, actionable findings.
• Critically review developers' CB capability assessments, safeguards safety cases, and related policies to raise the bar on safety.
• Translate findings into practical guidance that informs developer practices and decisions.

Example questions you might tackle

• How effective is pre-training-data filtering at reducing harmful CB capabilities while preserving benign performance?
• What scope of filtering works best, and how does this extend to open-weight models?
• What would an effective differential or structured access regime look like for advanced CB-related AI system capabilities?

Requirements

• Broad knowledge of frontier AI development, safety and governance: training/fine-tuning pipelines, evaluations and safeguards, developers' frontier safety frameworks, and technical mitigations for AI–CB risk.
• Hands-on experience building or working deeply with general-purpose AI systems and their safety/safeguards stacks.
• Experience writing production-level Python code that is scalable, robust and easy to maintain, ideally in a team.
• Knowledge of scaffolding, prompting, fine-tuning and/or evaluating large language models.
• Knowledge of math, statistics, and machine learning sufficient to read and critique AI research.
• Demonstrated research taste and execution: originate high-leverage ideas, drive them independently, and ship impactful technical or governance products.
• Bias to action and ownership; quickly learn unfamiliar domains and prioritise policy-relevant technical work over purely academic novelty.
• High agency and adaptability; communicate clearly and collaborate effectively across disciplines while operating autonomously in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
• Familiarity with relevant datasets, benchmarks, or evaluation methodologies for CB risks from AI.

Please note that this role requires Security Clearance (SC), which requires at least 2 years of UK residency, and a willingness to undergo Developed Vetting (DV) if required.

Other core requirements

• Spend at least 9 days per fortnight working with us.
• Work from our office in London (Whitehall) at least 3 days/week.
• Be UK-based.

What We Offer

• Impact you couldn't have anywhere else.
• Incredibly talented, mission-driven and supportive colleagues.
• Direct influence on how frontier AI is governed and deployed globally.
• Opportunity to shape the first & best-resourced public-interest research team focused on AI security.
• Pre-release access to multiple frontier models and ample compute.
• Extensive operational support so you can focus on research and ship quickly.
• Work with experts across national security, policy, AI research and adjacent sciences.
• Own important problems early if you're talented and driven.
• 5 days off for learning and development, annual stipends for learning and development and funding for conferences and external collaborations.
• Freedom to pursue research bets without product pressure.
• Opportunities to publish and collaborate externally.

Life & family

• Modern central London office (cafes, food court, gym) or option to work in similar government offices in Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Salford or Bristol.
• Hybrid working, flexibility for occasional remote work abroad and stipends for work-from-home equipment.
• At least 25 days' annual leave, 8 public holidays, extra team-wide breaks and 3 days off for volunteering.
• Generous paid parental leave (36 weeks of UK statutory leave shared between parents + 3 extra paid weeks + option for additional unpaid time).
• On top of your salary, we contribute *****% of your base salary to your pension.
• Discounts and benefits for cycling to work, donations and retail/gyms.
• Annual salary is benchmarked to role scope and relevant experience.
• Most offers land between £65,000 and £145,000 (base plus technical allowance), with *****% employer pension and other benefits on top.

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. The interview process may vary candidate to candidate, however, you should expect a typical process to include some technical proficiency tests, discussions with a cross-section of our team at AISI (including non-technical staff), conversations with your team lead. The process will culminate in a conversation with members of the senior team here at AISI.

• Initial interview
• Technical take home test
• Second interview and review of take home test
• Third interview
• Final interview with members of the senior team