Software Engineer - Core Technology Team

AI Security Institute; Camden Town; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI security organization in Camden Town is looking for a skilled developer to join their Core Technology Team. You will be responsible for building tools to evaluate advanced AI models and working closely with researchers. Candidates should have a strong background in Python and cloud infrastructure, along with excellent communication skills. This role offers opportunities for mentorship and involvement in high-impact research projects in a collaborative environment.

Benefits

Generous leave

Learning benefits

Pension contributions

Qualifications

• Experience writing production quality code at fast pace.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience working with a world-class research team.

Responsibilities

• Add features to sandbox plugins for advanced agentic evaluations.
• Support a research team with custom infrastructure designs.
• Collaborate with the open-source community.

Skills

Python

Production quality code

Teamwork

Verbal communication

Written communication

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Docker

Job description

Responsibilities

• Add a feature to one of our "sandbox plugins" for Inspect, supporting advanced agentic evals with safe mechanisms to let models write and execute arbitrary code
• Implement support for a new class of open-weights model on our model hosting platform
• Support a research team with designing custom infrastructure for a new research project
• Collaborate with the open-source community on a feature in Inspect or Inspect's plugin ecosystem
• Assist with an evaluation testing exercise of a frontier AI model, debugging issues that appear in Inspect from API changes in the lab's latest SDK

Internal Fraud and security context: The role involves processing details of civil servants who have been dismissed for internal fraud, or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned. The Cabinet Office receives details from participating government organisations and may disclose a limited dataset to DLUHC for pre-employment checks. See the vetting charter for details.

Security and compliance: Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check and obtain baseline personnel security standard (BPSS) clearance before appointment. There is a strong preference for eligibility for counter-terrorist check (CTC) clearance. Some roles may require higher levels of clearance, stated by exception in the job advertisement.

You may be a good fit if you have

• Writing production quality code at fast pace.
• Designing, shipping, and maintaining complex tech products.
• Improving technical standards across a team, through mentoring and feedback.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience working with a world-class research team comprised of both scientists and engineers (e.g. in a top-3 lab).
• Python experience, including understanding the intricacies of the language and the wider ecosystem/tooling.
• Experience building and maintaining systems on AWS or other cloud providers using infrastructure-as-code.

Required Experience

• Writing production quality code
• Writing code efficiently
• Python
• Written communication
• Verbal communication
• Teamwork
• Interpersonal skills
• Tackling challenging problems

Desired Experience

• Expertise in Cloud Infrastructure or DevOps (AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, CDK, Docker, etc.)
• Cybersecurity expertise
• ML Ops (vLLM, agent frameworks, fine-tuning, RAG systems, etc.)

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 are in the heart of the UK government with direct lines to No. 10, and we work with frontier developers and governments globally. The role sits within AISI Core Technology Team, which builds tools and infrastructure used across research work, including Inspect (open-source evaluation framework) and hosting frontier open-weights models for evaluations or human studies. You may work with cutting-edge technologies on research problems with real-world impact and receive mentorship from technical leads. You may interact with researchers and staff from leading organisations.

Impact and team culture: We offer a collaborative, mission-driven environment with opportunities to influence frontier AI governance and deployment globally, and to work with diverse experts in national security, policy, AI research, and adjacent sciences.

Location and benefits: Modern central London office or equivalent government offices; hybrid working with occasional remote work abroad; generous leave and learning benefits; pension contributions; and additional compensation details including salary ranges aligned with role scope and experience. Salary bands and levels are provided in the advertisement alongside the Civil Service interview criteria.