Frontier AI Alignment Engineer – Red Team Research

AI Security Institute; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

The AI Security Institute is hiring Research Engineers and Research Scientists to join the Alignment Red Team. We welcome junior to principal levels and oversee misalignment research on frontier AI systems across safety, security and alignment domains.

Join a globally influential team working with frontier labs and government partners to develop evaluation methodologies, publish findings, and build tools that advance model alignment and reliability.

Qualifications

• Ability to work autonomously on complex research projects involving substantial engineering.
• Have completed at least one significant research project in AI safety, security or alignment involving engineering, experiment design and analysis on frontier LLMs.
• Strong software engineering and ML experience writing complex projects involving language models and ML.
• 1+ years professional experience programming in Python for ML or SWE work.
• Experience writing clean, documented research code for machine learning experiments, including experience with ML frameworks like PyTorch or evaluation frameworks like Inspect.
• Proven ability in a team environment – flexible, adaptive to needs, and willing to contribute wherever necessary.
• Impact-driven mindset, motivated by doing the most important work rather than what's superficially impressive.
• High velocity and high-quality bar for outputs.

Responsibilities

• Researching methods to automatically search for misalignment in frontier models, including misalignment related to loss-of-control risks such as research sabotage and reward‑seeking.
• Building and running alignment evaluations relevant for loss-of-control risks that current benchmarks don’t capture.
• Running pre-deployment evaluations to test the alignment of AI systems, and analysing and reporting results to frontier AI companies and UK and allied governments.
• Contributing to public-facing research publications (like our published alignment evaluation case study) and technical reports that advance the field's understanding of misalignment risks and alignment evaluation methodology.
• Designing and building software and tooling, including open-source software, for better alignment evaluations, improving efficiency, realism, and usability.
• Conducting threat modelling, analysis, and conceptual thinking to understand crucial model behaviours that could lead to loss of control.
• Performing alignment incident investigations to understand after the fact what drove certain kinds of misaligned behaviour in frontier models.
• Mentoring and advising external collaborators and researchers to do work relevant to the team’s goals and alignment testing more broadly.

Skills

Python for ML

Software engineering

Autonomy

Teamwork

Tools

PyTorch

Inspect

Job description

The AI Security Institute is hiring Research Engineers and Research Scientists to join the Alignment Red Team. We welcome junior to principal levels and oversee misalignment research on frontier AI systems across safety, security and alignment domains.

Join a globally influential team working with frontier labs and government partners to develop evaluation methodologies, publish findings, and build tools that advance model alignment and reliability.