Backend Software Engineer (Research team)

Applications deadline: We accept submissions until 15 January 2026. We review applications on a rolling basis and encourage early submissions.

ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY

We’re looking for Backend Software Engineers who are excited to build tools for frontier AGI safety research, e.g. building and maintaining evals libraries and tools for monitoring and controlling our own LLM traffic.

REPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS

• Internal tooling for efficiently running and analyzing evaluations.
• Automated evaluation pipelines to minimise the time from getting access to a new model for pre-deployment testing to analysing the most important results and sharing them.
• Orchestration tools that allow researchers to run thousands of agentic evaluations in parallel on remote machines with high security and reliability.
• LLM proxy service that enables us to monitor all of our coding agent traffic in real time and identify undesired behaviour automatically.
• LLM agents and MCP tools to automate internal software engineering and research tasks, with sandboxes to prevent major failures.
• CI pipeline optimisations to reduce execution time and eliminate flaky tests.
• Telemetry API and instrumentation of our existing tools, allowing us to monitor usage and improve reliability.
• Data warehousing pipeline and service to store thousands of eval transcripts which researchers can study and build datasets from.
• Upstream improvements to the Inspect framework and ecosystem, e.g. support for evaluating modern agentic scaffolds.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Rapidly prototype and iterate on internal tools and libraries for building and running frontier language model evaluations.
• Lead the development of major features from ideation to implementation.
• Collaboratively define and shape the software roadmap and priorities.
• Establish and advocate for good software design practices, codebase health, and coding agent practices.
• Work closely with researchers to understand what challenges they face.
• Assist researchers with implementation and debugging of research code.
• Communicate clearly about technical decisions and tradeoffs.

KEY REQUIREMENTS

• You must have experience writing production-quality python code.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Bonus: Experience working with LLM agents or LLM evaluations.
• Infosecurity / cybersecurity experience.
• Experience working with AWS.
• Interest in AI Safety.

We want to emphasise that people who feel they don’t fulfil all of these characteristics but think they would be a good fit for the position nonetheless are strongly encouraged to apply.

LOGISTICS

• Start Date: Target of 2-3 months after the first interview.
• Time Allocation: Full-time.
• Location: The office is in London, next to the London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA) offices. This is an in-person role.
• Work Visas: We can sponsor UK visas.

BENEFITS

• Salary: 100k - 200k GBP (~135k - 270k USD).
• Flexible work hours and schedule.
• Unlimited vacation.
• Unlimited sick leave.
• Lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays.
• Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences.
• A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget.

ABOUT APOLLO RESEARCH

The rapid rise in AI capabilities offers tremendous opportunities, but also presents significant risks. At Apollo Research, we’re primarily concerned with risks from Loss of Control, i.e. risks coming from the model itself rather than humans misusing the AI.

ABOUT THE TEAM

The SWE team currently consists of Rusheb Shah, Andrei Matveiakin, Alex Kedrik, and Glen Rodgers. Beyond the SWE team, you will closely interact with the research scientists and engineers as the primary user group of your tools.

EQUALITY STATEMENT

Apollo Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and are committed to providing equal opportunities to all, regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation.

INTERVIEW PROCESS

Please complete the application form with your CV. The provision of a cover letter is optional but not necessary. Please also feel free to share links to relevant work samples.

About the interview process: Our multi-stage process includes a screening interview, a take-home test (approx. 2 hours), 3 technical interviews, and a final interview with Marius (CEO). The technical interviews will be closely related to tasks the candidate would do on the job. There are no leetcode-style general coding interviews.