About the job

Job summary

Summary

The AI Safety Institute (AISI) is seeking skilled research engineers to develop and maintain tools for the evaluation of next-generation frontier AI systems. As a bridge between software engineering and research, you’ll be embedded in an evaluations development team – focused on a specific AI risk area - to help execute complex model evaluations and build bespoke infrastructure. This position offers a unique opportunity to push forward an emerging field while part of an organisation that is a unique and fast-growing experiment in AI research and governance.

The AI Safety Institute

The AI Safety Institute is the first state-backed organisation focused on frontier AI safety for the public interest. We launched at the AI Safety Summit because we believe taking responsible action on this extraordinary technology requires a capable and empowered group of technical experts within government. Our staff includes senior alumni from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, startups and the UK government, and ML professors from Oxford and Cambridge. We are now calling on the world’s top technical talent to build the institute from the ground up. This is a truly unique opportunity to help shape AI safety at an international level.

We have ambitious goals and need to move fast. Our top priorities are to:

• Develop and conduct evaluations on advanced AI systems. We will characterise safety-relevant capabilities, understand the safety and security of systems, and assess their societal impacts.
• Drive foundational AI safety research. We will launch moonshot research projects and convene world-class external researchers
• Facilitate information exchange. We will establish clear information-sharing channels between the Institute and other national and international actors. These include policymakers, international partners, private companies, academia, civil society, and the broader public.

Job description

The Role

Research Engineers build and maintain scientific software to enable high quality research. They are uniquely placed to bridge the world of software engineering and research, and at the AI Safety Institute will be involved in challenging and diverse projects at the cutting edge of frontier AI development.

As a Research Engineer you would be embedding with one (or more) of our research teams.

Here you will be collaborating with research scientists and people running evaluations and user studies on the one hand, and with our Platform Engineering team on the other. You might also on-board, run and improve existing evaluations from the wider research community, as well as up-scaling new evaluation methods developed in-house. The research teams are:

• Chem/bio evaluations: misuse risks from frontier AI systems enabling chemical and biological weapons attacks
• Cyber evaluations: misuse risks from frontier AI systems enabling cyber attacks
• Safeguards analysis: evaluating the safety and security components of frontier AI systems for vulnerabilities
• Societal harms: evaluating threats to societal fabric from frontier AI (e.g entrenching biases and undermining trust in information)
• Loss of control: evaluating the risk of human disempowerment from autonomous AI systems
• AI and democracy: evaluating the risks frontier AI systems pose to elections and democratic trust

The Platform Engineering team will be providing the foundational infrastructure for our research projects. You will build on top of our platform to create bespoke, load-bearing infrastructure and tools for individual research projects. You will be able to independently run and analyse your own experiments to diagnose problems and understand our research work and tech stack in detail.

You will spend your time working not just on infrastructure code but also in the planning and execution of research projects, such as a wide range of evaluations of cutting-edge Frontier AI models. This includes working on analysing and visualising the outcomes of complex evaluation or fine-tuning procedures and managing large data sets.

As a research engineer it is your responsibility to make the hard trade-offs between when code needs to be load-bearing enough to support multiple experiments and when it is better to write “good enough" code to quickly prove or disprove a hypothesis. In this you will work very closely with our Research Scientists who will often be the main users for the tools you build.

Person specification

Requirements & Experience

This role may be a great fit if you:

• Have excellent knowledge of training, fine-tuning, scaffolding, prompting, deploying, and/or evaluating current cutting-edge machine learning systems such as LLMs and Diffusion Models.
• Have substantial experience working in a similar role in industry, relevant open-source collectives, or academia.
• Have experience conducting your own research, but most importantly as part of a cross-functional team.
• Possess a strong curiosity in understanding AI systems and have the ability to develop data collection, analysis and visualization interfaces to do so.
• Have substantial experience in building software systems to meet research requirements and have led or been a significant contributor to relevant software projects, demonstrating cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Deeply care about the user experience of a diverse range of users, from machine learning researchers to domain experts, to wide and diverse groups of human evaluators.
• Work independently and in a self-directed way, thriving in a constantly changing environment and a steadily growing team, while figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem.
• Bring your own voice and experience but also an eagerness to support your colleagues, being ready to do whatever is necessary for team’s success.
• Take responsibility for problems from beginning to end, demonstrating problem-solving abilities and preparedness to acquire any missing knowledge necessary to get the job done.

Core requirements

• You should be able to spend at least 4 days per week on working with us.
• You should be able to join us for at least 12 months.
• You should be able work from our office in London (Whitehall) for parts of the week, but we provide flexibility for remote work.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £85,000, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £11,340 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

Please apply with a copy of your CV and a personal statement (500 word limit) setting out your answers to the questions below:

• Why are you interested in joining the AISI right now?
• What are the most important technical projects UK government needs to undertake within the next few months to advance AI Safety?
• What do you want to be doing to drive those projects forward?
• Is there anything else about your skills, experience or background you’d like us to be aware of?

Sift and interview process

In the event of a large number of applicants, applications will be sifted on the personal statement.

Candidates should expect to go through some or all of the following stages once an application has been submitted:-

Stage 1:- Coding Test - To be completed within 48 hours

Stage 2:- Sifting if successful at coding test

Stage 3:- Initial Interview

Stage 4:- Pre Interview take home test

Stage 5:- Formal interview and review of take home test

Stage 6:- Third stage interview

Stage 7:- Senior Civil Servant interview

Sift and interview dates

Expected Timeline subject to change

Sift dates: w/c 29/01/2024

Interview dates: w/c 05/02/2024

Interview Location: MS Teams.

Candidates are asked to note the above timetable, exercising flexibility through the recruitment and selection process.

If you have any questions about the role or your application, then please send an email to AISI-TalentRecruitment@dsit.gov.uk

Further Information

Reasonable Adjustment

We are proud to be a disability confident leader and we welcome applications from disabled candidates and candidates with long-term conditions.

We fully support adjustments throughout our recruitment process and we encourage candidates to discuss their adjustment needs by emailing the job contact which can be found under the contact point for applicants section.

We do not have an exhaustive list of adjustments that we support but just some examples include additional time to complete your application form, behaviour questions up to 72 hours prior to interview and having extra time at interview.

If you are experiencing accessibility problems with any attachments on this advert, please contact the email address in the 'Contact point for applicants' section.

If successful and transferring from another Government Department a criminal record check may be carried out.

New entrants are expected to join on the minimum of the pay band.

A location based reserve list of successful candidates will be kept for 12 months. Should another role become available within that period you may be offered this position.

Please note terms and conditions are attached. Please take time to read the document to determine how these may affect you.

Any move to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare. Determine your eligibility https://www.childcarechoices.gov.uk

DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e. working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home). 

In order to process applications without delay, we will be sending a Criminal Record Check to Disclosure and Barring Service on your behalf.

However, we recognise in exceptional circumstances some candidates will want to send their completed forms direct. If you will be doing this, please advise Government Recruitment Service of your intention by emailing Pre-EmploymentChecks.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk stating the job reference number in the subject heading. 

Applicants who are successful at interview will be, as part of pre-employment screening, subject to a check on the Internal Fraud Database (IFD). This check will provide information about employees who have been dismissed for fraud or dishonesty offences. This check also applies to employees who resign or otherwise leave before being dismissed for fraud or dishonesty had their employment continued. Any applicant’s details held on the IFD will be refused employment. 

A candidate is not eligible to apply for a role within the Civil Service if the application is made within a 5 year period following a dismissal for carrying out internal fraud against government.

Feedback

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). 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. The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.