Senior Engineering Lead, Chem-Bio

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.

About the Team

AISI's Chem Bio (CB) team conducts technical 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.

Role Responsibilities

• Lead CB's engineering team — set technical direction, define engineering standards, and own the roadmap for shared infrastructure, tools, and components used across CB's research projects.
• Line-manage a small number of engineers — provide regular support, feedback, and development guidance to direct reports (expect 1–3 reports as the team grows).
• Design and build reliable systems — architect and deliver the core platform that enables researchers to run experiments and ship results quickly, including LLM-based agent systems, evaluation frameworks, and supporting infrastructure.
• Work closely with researchers — translate varied research needs across general agents, science agents, chemical and biological models and other CB workstreams into well-engineered, maintainable systems.
• Hire and grow the team — run hiring pipelines for future engineering roles, contribute to interview design and candidate assessment, and help shape what great engineering talent looks like at AISI.
• Shape engineering culture— establish ways of working, code quality standards, and development practices for a growing engineering team embedded in a research-heavy environment.
• Represent CB engineering across AISI — coordinate with Core Technology and other engineering teams to share tooling, align on infrastructure, and avoid duplication.

Role Requirements

We are looking for the following skills, experience and attitudes, but a successful candidate will not necessarily need to meet all these criteria. We can be flexible in shaping the role and salary to your background, expertise, and level of experience.

• Significant experience writing production-level Python code that is scalable, robust, and easy to maintain, with a track record of leading technical work in a team.
• Strong infrastructure and platform skills — experience with cloud environments (AWS), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and job scheduling (Slurm or similar).
• Demonstrated experience leading or managing engineers — whether through formal line management, tech-leading a team, or running hiring pipelines.
• Familiarity with the AI/ML ecosystem: OpenAI-compatible APIs, PyTorch, and the tooling around LLM-based systems.
• Ability to work across multiple teams, understanding varied research needs and delivering reliable engineering solutions.
• A sense of mission, urgency, and responsibility for success: Demonstrated ability to solve challenging problems, implement solutions efficiently and acquire any missing knowledge necessary to get the job done.
• Motivated to build software with direct policy impact.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to work effectively in a dynamic, multidisciplinary team environment.

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience working in a research environment — you don’t need to be a researcher, but you should be comfortable working alongside them and translating ambiguous research requirements into engineering plans.
• Familiarity with computational biology tools, workflows, or datasets.
• Experience building or maintaining internal developer platforms, shared libraries, or CI/CD systems for technical teams.

Please note that this is a reserved post. We can only consider applications from UK nationals (including dual nationals who hold British citizenship). Appointment is conditional on successfully completing UK Government SC clearance. Prior clearance is not required—we will sponsor and support you. You should normally have been resident in the UK for the past 5 years. You may also be required to undergo Developed Vetting (DV). DV typically requires a longer period of UK residency (around 10 years). Employment is conditional on obtaining and maintaining the required clearance(s).

Other core requirements

• You should be able to spend at least 9 days per fortnight working with us.
• You should be willing to work from our office in London (Whitehall) at least 3 days/week.
• You should 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.
• 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.
• 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 (cafes, food court, gym), 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.

*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.

UK Diversity Questions

It's important to us that everyone feels an included part of the team, whoever they are and whatever their background. These questions will help us to identify the diversity of our applicants. Should you not wish to provide an answer, you will always have the option to not provide a response with a ‘I don’t wish to answer’ option. Your answers will not impact your hiring outcomes whatsoever.

If there are any questions you would like to further discuss or want clarity on, we’d be happy to talk to you about this if you reach out to active.campaigns@dsit.gov.uk