Research Manager â Alignment
Research Manager â Alignment
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Job Description
About the AI Security Institute
The AI Security Institute is the largest team in a government dedicated to understanding AI capabilities and risks in the world.
Our mission is to equip governments with an empirical understanding of the safety of advanced AI systems. We conduct research to understand the capabilities and impacts of advanced AI and develop and test risk mitigations. We focus on risks with security implications including the potential of AI to assist with the development of chemical and biological weapons how it can be used to carry out cyber-attacks enable crimes such as fraud and the possibility of loss of control.
The risks from AI are not sci-fi they are urgent. By combining the agility of a tech start-up with the expertise and mission-driven focus of government were building a unique and innovative organisation to prevent AIs harms from impeding its potential.
This role sits outside of the DDaT pay framework given the scope of this role requires in depth technical expertise in frontier AI safety robustness and advanced AI architectures.
The deadline for applying this role is Sunday 15 June 2025 end of day anywhere on Earth.
AISIs alignment team examines ways to prevent models from autonomously attempting to cause harm. The teams research is led by Geoffrey Irving AISIs Chief Scientist a research agenda can be found here.
This exciting new team is part of AISIs Solutions Group which will also examine ways to prevent misuse risks (our Safeguards team) and ways to prevent models from causing harm even if they are autonomously attempting to do so (our Control team).
ROLE SUMMARY
In this role you will be people managing a team of very exceptional and highly motivated individuals including complexity theorists game theorists learning theorists and ML research scientists. Youll also be growing your team getting stuck in with sourcing specific people we want often world-leading experts in their domain and then helping run the full process and getting them excited about the role.
Within your team youre expected to provide fantastic management including building strong relationships with the other team members as well as giving regular feedback and receive mentorship and coaching both from the workstream lead as well as the broader group of research directors in AISI (people like Geoffrey Irving and Yarin Gal). In addition we have a very strong learning culture including paper-reading groups and Friday afternoons dedicated to deep learning.
Your team is given huge amounts of autonomy to chase exciting research directions including:
- Conducting foundational research pushing forward the frontier of our understanding about how to make highly advanced AI systems safe alongside AISI expertise and external collaborators
- Breaking down the alignment problem by producing safety case sketches for highly-capable AI systems using alignment and scalable oversight techniques
- Making funding recommendations finding the best research projects targeting the most important problems to solve and supervising this external research
Person Specification
You may be a good fit if you have some of the following skills experience and attitudes:
- Experience people managing strong research or engineering teams with well thought-out views on management philosophy and style.
- Experience coaching team members & providing feedback.
- Strong understanding of large language models (e.g. GPT-4). This includes both a broad understanding of the literature as well as hands-on experience with either research or research engineering.
- Broad knowledge of existing approaches to alignment (T-shaped: some deep knowledge lots of shallow knowledge).
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- A track record of helping teams achieve exceptional things.
- Experience working with world-class multi-disciplinary teams (e.g. in a top-3 AI lab).
- Experience working within a research team that has delivered multiple exceptional scientific breakthroughs in deep learning (or a related field).
- Strong track-record of academic excellence (e.g. multiple spotlight papers at top-tier conferences).
- Acting as a bar raiser for interviews.
Salary & Benefits
We are hiring individuals at a range of seniority and experience. Your dedicated talent partner will work with you as you move through our assessment process to explain our internal benchmarking process. For this role we would expect candidates to be L5 and above. The range of salaries are available below salaries comprise of a base salary technical allowance plus additional benefits as detailed on this page.
- Level 5 - Total Package 105000 - 115000inclusiveof a base salary 55805 plus additional technical talent allowance of between 49195 - 59195
- Level 6 - Total Package 125000 - 135000inclusiveof a base salary 68770 plus additional technical talent allowance of between 56230 - 66230
- Level 7 - Total Package 145000inclusiveof a base salary 68770 plus additional technical talent allowance of 76230
There are a range of pension options available which can be found through the Civil Service website.
Additional Information
Internal Fraud Database
The Internal Fraud function of the Fraud Error Debt and Grants Function at the Cabinet Office processes details of civil servants who have been dismissed for committing internal fraud or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned. The Cabinet Office receives the details from participating government organisations of civil servants who have been dismissed or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned for internal fraud. In instances such as this civil servants are then banned for 5 years from further employment in the civil service. The Cabinet Office then processes this data and discloses a limited dataset back to DLUHC as a participating government organisations. DLUHC then carry out the pre employment checks so as to detect instances where known fraudsters are attempting to reapply for roles in the civil service. In this way the policy is ensured and the repetition of internal fraud is prevented. For more information please see -Internal Fraud Register.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check and getbaseline personnel security standard (BPSS)clearancebefore they can be appointed. Additionally there is a strong preference for eligibility forcounter-terrorist check (CTC)clearance. Some roles may require higher levels of clearance and we will state this by exception in the job advertisement.See our vetting charter here.Nationality requirements
We may be able to offer roles to applicant from any nationality or background. As such we encourage you to apply even if you do not meet the standard nationality requirements (opens in a new window).
Working for the Civil Service
Diversity and Inclusion
Required Experience:
Manager
Employment Type
Full Time
