Software Engineer - Core Technology Team

Role Description

The AI Security Institutes Research Unit is looking for motivated and talented Software Engineers to join AISIs Core Technology Team. We are looking for exceptional candidates at all experience levels from junior through to senior or staff to work in small teams on a range of critical research-oriented software and infrastructure.

In this role youll work with cutting-edge technologies on research problems with real-world impact and receive mentorship and coaching from your manager and the technical leads on your team. Youll also regularly interact with world-famous researchers and other incredible staff (including alumni from Anthropic DeepMind OpenAI Google Apple and professors from Oxford and Cambridge).

About our Core Technology Team

AISI Core Technology Team comprises several teams building tools and infrastructure used across all of our research work. This includes projects like Inspect (our open-source evaluation framework) systems for running evaluations at scale and hosting frontier open-weights models for evaluations or human studies.

As a software engineer on one of these teams you might:

• 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 Inspects plugin ecosystem
• Assist with an evaluation testing exercise of a frontier AI model debugging issues that appear in Inspect from API changes in the labs latest SDK

You may be a good fit if you have some of the following skills experience and attitudes:

• 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 the good vs. bad Pythonic ways of doing things and much of the wider ecosystem/tooling.
• Experience building and maintaining systems on AWS or other cloud providers using infrastructure-as-code.

Motivated candidates are encouraged to apply even if you dont meet all the above criteria.

Required Experience

We select based on skills and experience regarding the following areas:

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

Desired Experience

We additionally may factor in experience with particular areas like:

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

Salary & Benefits

We are hiring individuals at all ranges of seniority and experience within this research unit and this advert allows you to apply for any of the roles within this range. Your dedicated talent partner will work with you as you move through our assessment process to explain our internal benchmarking process. The full range of salaries are available below salaries comprise of a base salary technical allowance plusadditional benefitsas detailed on this page.

• Level 3 - Total Package 65000 - 75000inclusiveof a base salary 35720 plus additional technical talent allowance of between 29280 - 39280
• Level 4 - Total Package 85000 - 95000inclusiveof a base salary 42495 plus additional technical talent allowance of between 42505 - 52505
• 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.

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.

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