Research Engineer: Frontier AI Societal Impacts

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.

The Societal Impacts team studies high-impact societal risks caused by frontier AI deployment. Our team's mandate is to build a rigorous, world-class evidence base for the safe and responsible development of frontier AI by identifying risks, measuring impacts, and informing mitigation strategies. Risk areas we study include frontier AI enabling criminal activity, undermining trust in information, harming psychological wellbeing, and facilitating malicious social engineering.

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, building evaluations for AI models and products, and developing datasets to monitor risk exposure and severity.

Successful candidates will be strong researchers and engineers, who work with our research scientists to design, implement and run experiments that answer important questions about the effects AI will have on society. Illustrative projects might include:

• Implementing a human-AI interaction study where multiple human and AI participants converse and play a game
• Building a pipeline to scrape and analyse publicly available AI agent implementations
• Designing and running model evaluations for various societal risks from AI model behaviour

This is a multidisciplinary team, and we look for people with a diversity of backgrounds.

Required Skills and Experience

• Experience writing scalable, maintainable Python code
• Experience in one or more of the following:
• Data engineering, including data collection, data cleaning, processing, and visualisation
• ML engineering, including experience training/evaluating models using PyTorch or a similar library
• Full-stack web development
• Knowledge of machine learning sufficient to understand recent papers in the field
• Strong verbal communication, experience working on a collaborative research team, and interpersonal skills
• Demonstrable interest in and understanding of the societal impacts of AI

Desired Skills and Experience

• Building and maintaining complex data products
• Designing and implementing experiments in human-AI interaction
• Training or evaluation of frontier AI models
• Research related to societal impacts of AI systems
• A specialisation in a relevant field of social or political science, economics, cognitive science, criminology, security studies, AI safety, or another relevant field.

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.
• Resources & access: Pre-release access to multiple frontier models and ample compute.
• Extensive operational support so you can focus on research and ship quickly.
• 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 (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.

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

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.