Technical Programme Manager

AI Security Institute; United States; Hybrid; USD 86,000 - 192,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Pension contribution

Learning & development stipend

Job summary

The AI Security Institute is seeking a Technical Programme Manager for the Model Transparency team. You will work with researchers and engineers to turn broad research questions into tractable programmes, ensuring rigorous empirical standards and clear deliverables.

Responsibilities include architecture, delivery tracking, and cross-government engagement to move fast while ensuring reliability and safety. Appointment is conditional on UK Government SC clearance.

Qualifications

• Experience delivering technical programmes in high-ambiguity environments.
• Ability to scope open-ended goals and provide critical challenge to technical teams.
• Strong credibility with researchers and engineers through evidence-based decision making.
• Proactive, high-agency ownership with a bias for action.

Responsibilities

• Define project scope, milestones, and success criteria for technical work.
• Track progress and unblock delivery to improve team velocity.
• Engage with government partners and represent the team in technical discussions.
• Set operational rhythm to enable rapid progress while managing dependencies.

Skills

Programme management

Stakeholder engagement

AI frontier knowledge

Ambiguity handling

Delivery tracking

Technical credibility

Job description

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 escal... 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.

• 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 work deeply enough to provide critical challenge and engage beyond process.
• Comfort operating at the frontier of AI. You do not need to be a machine learning researcher, but you need to be fluent enough in frontier AI to operate in constant conversation with technical staff about our work, strategy, and research taste; you should have your own taste on what's hard, what's speculative, what's blocked, and what "good" looks like for a given experiment or evaluation.
• High agency and ownership. You take responsibility for outcomes, not activities. When something is stuck, you pick up the phone. You do not wait for someone else to escal...
• Credibility with technical teams. Researchers trust you because you understand their work, respect their constraints, and demonstrably make their lives easier. You influence through competence and service, not authority or process.
• Strong prioritisation under pressure. You can identify what actually matters on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly level and focus the team's energy. You have the judgement to recognise work that isn't landing and the confidence to recommend that it stop.
• Discretion and judgement in a sensitive domain. You understand that the work we do often carries sensitivity.

Strong candidates may also have

• Existing security clearances.
• Fluency in, or eagerness to adopt, modern productivity tools (coding agents, Linear, Slack) and willingness to use AI tools as part of daily work.

Appointment is conditional on successfully completing UK Government SC clearance. Prior clearance is not required-we will sponsor and support you. You should normally have been resident in the UK for the past 5 years. More detail on clearance eligibility can be found on the UK Government website: National security vetting: clearance levels - GOV.UK.

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.

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.
• Work with the Prime Minister's AI Advisor and leading AI companies.
• 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.
• Work with experts across national security, policy, AI research and adjacent sciences.

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, 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.
• 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.

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.
• Level 3: £65,000-£75,000 (Base £40,850 + Technical Allowance £24,150-£34,150)
• Level 4: £85,000-£95,000 (Base £48,540 + Technical Allowance £36,460-£46,460)
• Level 5: £105,000-£115,000 (Base £63,165 + Technical Allowance £41,835-£51,835)