Research Engineer – Human Influence in London

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 (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.

Team Description

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.

Role Description

We are looking for a Research Engineer to join the Human Influence team. Successful candidates will be strong researchers and engineers with a track record of carrying out scalable work in LLM post-training and fine-tuning, especially with Reinforcement Learning; or with comparable expertise in engineering and validating large-scale evaluation pipelines.

Projects the Research Engineer might deliver include:

• Designing and building a Reinforcement Learning environment aimed at mitigating a model’s ability to e.g. deceive a user in a one-to-one conversation or within multi-agent threads.
• Leveraging state-of-the-art interpretability methods to identify why models exhibit concerning behaviour, and designing mitigations that can be applied to models irrespective of training regime.
• Building the scalable system architecture underpinning the repeatable delivery and analysis of model evaluations and benchmarks.
• Delivering ambitious, engineering-heavy research projects on Human Influence topics, for instance by leveraging post-training techniques on a large compute cluster.

Who we're looking for

This is a multidisciplinary team, and successful candidates come from a wide range of backgrounds.

Essential

• Proven experience deploying a benchmark, evaluation, or product to users, e.g. an evaluations pipeline in an app, an open-source contribution, or similar large-scale contributions to research.
• Clear understanding of the current AI safety literature, and an interest in topics relevant to Human Influence.
• Clear and consistent communication.
• Clear understanding of fundamental Machine Learning concepts.

Research and engineering:

• Experience fine-tuning or post-training LLMs using standard methods, using common libraries like PyTorch, Keras, JAX, or custom code.
• Comfortable working with RL environments and using RL or other reward-based methods to post-train or finetune an ML model, ideally an LLM.
• Writing scalable and maintainable production code in (at least) Python.
• Comfortable with serving, scaling, and containerising ML code, e.g. using Docker, Kubernetes, Ray, FastAPI, SLURM, especially on large compute clusters.

Desirable

• Good understanding of model internals, e.g. for mechanistic interpretability research, or analysing model activations and weights.
• Experience shipping an AI safety pipeline to production (e.g. evaluations, monitoring, serving custom models), going beyond research prototypes.
• Experience using data to answer complex research questions, e.g. by scoping, training, and validating a classifier or finetuned LLM.
• Experience with frontend and node.js deployments.

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.
• Work with the Prime Minister’s AI Advisor and leading AI companies.
• Opportunity to shape the first & best-resourced public-interest research team focused on AI security.

Resources & access

• 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.

Growth & autonomy

• If you’re talented and driven, you’ll own important problems early.
• 5 days off and 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, or where applicable, 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 28.97% of your base salary to your pension.
• Discounts and benefits for cycling to work, donations and retail/gyms.

Salary

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.

Additional Information

Use of AI in Applications

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.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check and get baseline personnel security standard (BPSS) clearance before they can be appointed. Additionally, there is a strong preference for eligibility for counter-terrorist check (CTC) clearance. Some roles may require higher levels of clearance, and we will state this by exception in the job advertisement.

Nationality requirements

We may be able to offer roles to applicants from any nationality or background. As such we encourage you to apply even if you do not meet the standard nationality requirements.

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants. The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found.