Technical Programme Manager - Model Transparency

AI Security Institute (AISI); Greater London; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

The AI Security Institute (AISI) is hiring a Technical Programme Manager for the Model Transparency team to turn ambitious AI safety research questions into actionable programmes. You will work closely with researchers and engineers to turn complex questions into tractable plans, ensuring empirical rigor and timely delivery.

You will coordinate cross-government engagements and manage dependencies across workstreams, driving progress while adapting to evolving priorities in a fast-moving

Qualifications

• Proven experience delivering technical programmes in high-ambiguity environments.
• Ability to scope and structure open-ended goals.
• Earned the trust of technical teams and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define the programme architecture with clear milestones and success criteria.
• Track delivery, surface blockers, and enable the team to stay focused.
• Engage with government partners at a technical level and maintain relationships.
• Set operational rhythm to keep a small team moving at pace in a government context.

Skills

Technical programme delivery

Ambiguity management

Stakeholder engagement

Team collaboration

Job description

About The AI Security Institute

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.

About The AI Security Institute

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.

We’re here because governments are critical for advanced AI going well, and UK AISI is uniquely positioned to mobilise them. With our resources, unique agility and international influence, this is the best place to shape both AI development and government action.

The deadline for applying to this role is Sunday 1st November, end of day, anywhere on Earth.

About The Role

AISI aims to turn progress on important research questions in AI security into real insight and impact for our partners and the public. This requires running research programmes that actually deliver, and making these programmes rigorous and fast is its own discipline. The AI Security Institute is hiring a Technical Programme Manager for our Model Transparency team to do exactly this.

Over the next twelve months, this team will need to move faster, deliver more complex research programmes and evaluations, and engage more deeply with partners in major AI labs and across government than ever before.

Technical Programme Managers make this work possible. You will work directly with the team's researchers and engineers to turn vast research questions into tractable programmes. You will be held responsible for ensuring our research stands up to rigorous empirical standards to inform policy, recommending which technical work needs to happen, and untangling knotty dependencies across workstreams.

About The Team

The ability to effectively evaluate and monitor AI systems will grow in importance as models become more capable, autonomous, and integrated into society. If models can detect and game evaluations, obscure their reasoning, or behave differently under observation, the safety claims that governments and developers rely on become unreliable. Understanding and addressing these risks is essential to ensuring that oversight of advanced AI systems keeps pace with their capabilities.

The Model Transparency team is a research team within AISI focused on ensuring that evaluations, assessments, and monitoring of frontier AI systems remain reliable as models become less transparent. We research how and why oversight is declining – through phenomena such as evaluation awareness, unfaithful chain-of-thought reasoning, and changes in model architectures – and develop methods (including white and black box methods) to detect, measure, and mitigate potential issues. We share our findings with frontier AI companies (including Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind), UK government officials, and allied governments, and publicly to inform their deployment, research, and policy decisions. We also work directly with safety teams at frontier labs, contributing to safety case reviews and helping improve their alignment evaluation methodology.

Our recent work includes the loss of oversight report, auditing games for sandbagging, reproducing natural emergent misalignment from reward hacking, and identifying open-weight language models that game propensity evaluations.

What You Will Own

Programme architecture. You will work directly with your team's technical staff to set the scope of projects: refining what questions we're actually trying to answer, what the milestones and success criteria are for technical work, and how to sequence dependencies, resource, and time across the team. You will turn "we should probably look into X" into a tractable plan with clear deliverables, without imposing process that gets in the team's way. You must be comfortable with ambiguity: you will be immersed in a fast-moving environment and won’t always have a settled roadmap.

Delivery tracking and unblocking. You will spot and solve problems so that the team's delivery continually improves, and own tracking progress to create visibility and establish control without overhead. You will surface technical blockers before they become crises, intervene directly to resolve them, and know exactly when and to whom to upscale. The goal is the team spending their time on the work, not logistics.

Cross-government technical engagement. You will speak with government partners on a technical level and be a trusted representative and ambassador for good relationships with them.

Team operations and pace. You will determine the operational rhythm that lets a small, high-performing team inside government move at the speed of billion-dollar AI companies. You will ensure the team has what it needs to deliver and be unfussy about doing whatever needs to be done to unblock things and prevent them from falling through the cracks.

Role Requirements

• A track record working with technical colleagues. You have delivered technical programmes in a similarly high-ambiguity environment. You know how to scope and structure open-ended goals (not just deliver against a pre-defined plan). You have earned the trust of technical teams by understanding their