Staff Threat Detection & Response Engineer

About the AI Security Institute

The AI Security Institute is the worlds largest and best-funded team dedicated to understanding advanced AI risks and translating that knowledge into action. Were in the heart of the UK government with direct lines to No. 10 (the Prime Ministers office) and we work with frontier developers and governments globally.

Were 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.

About the Team:

Security Engineering at the AI Security Institute (AISI) exists to help our researchers move fast safely. We are founding the Security Engineering team in a largely greenfield cloud environment we treat security as a measurable researcher centric product.
Secure by design platforms automated governance and intelligence led detection that protects our people partners models and data. We work shoulder to shoulder with research units and core technology teams and we optimise for enablement over gatekeeping proportionate controls low ego and high ownership.

What you might work on:

Help design and ship paved roads and secure defaults across our platform so researchers can build quickly and safely
Build provenance and integrity into the software supply chain (signing attestation artefact verification reproducibility)
Support strengthened identity segmentation secrets and key management to create a defensible foundation for evaluations at scale
Develop automated evidence driven assurance mapped to relevant standards reducing audit toil and improving signal
Create detections and response playbooks tailored to model evaluations and research workflows and run exercises to validate them
Threat model new evaluation pipelines with research and core technology teams fixing classes of issues at the platform layer
Assess third party services and hardware/software supply chains; introduce lightweight controls that raise the bar
Contribute to open standards and open source and share lessons with the broader community where appropriate

If you want to build security that accelerates frontier scale AI safety research and see your work land in production quickly this is a good place to do it

Role Summary

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve AISIs threat model working with platform research and policy teams
• Write detection rules correlation logic and hunt queries tailored to AISIs risk surface
• Ensure relevant signals are logged routed and contextualised appropriately
• Maintain detection playbooks triage documentation and escalation workflows
• Act as a liaison between AISI engineering and DSITs central SOC
• Evaluate detection gaps and propose new signal sources or telemetry improvements
• Extend the threat model to AI/ML: data/feature pipelines training/finetuning evaluations/release gates registries GPUs and inference services
• Develop detections for AI-specific risks: model weight custody/exfil (e.g. anomalous KMS decrypts S3 access) registry tampering dataset poisoning training pipeline/image compromise GPU abuse/cryptomining and inference abuse (prompt injection/data exfil patterns anomalous RAG connector access)
• Integrate AI platform telemetry (e.g. SageMaker/Bedrock logs model registry events provenance/attestation)
• Define hunts and correlations that tie AI safety/evaluation signals (red-team hits eval regressions release gate overrides) to security events and insider/outsider activity
• Author and rehearse AI-focused incident playbooks (weights leak compromised model artefacts inference abuse campaigns) with DSIT SOC

Profile requirements:

• Strong understanding of detection-as-code MITRE ATT&CK log pipelines and cloud signal sources
• Able to navigate outsourced SOC relationships while owning internal threat understanding
• Familiarity with AWS CloudTrail GuardDuty KMS S3 access logs EKS/ECS audit custom log ingestion; exposure to SageMaker/Bedrock or equivalent a plus
• Curious methodical and proactive mindset
• Practical grasp of AI/ML attack surfaces and telemetry needs (model registries weights custody GPU/accelerator fleets inference gateways vector stores)
• Familiarity with AI threat frameworks (e.g. MITRE ATLAS OWASP Top 10 for LLMs) desirable

Key Competencies:

• Detection engineering mindset focused on signal quality and measurable coverage
• Familiarity with MITRE ATT&CK and detection pipelines
• Understanding of cloud-native telemetry and logging gaps
• Ability to collaborate with outsourced SOCs
• Instrumenting and detecting threats across AI/ML workloads (weights datasets training/inference) and correlating safety and security signals

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

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.

Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework - Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework

There are a range of pension options available which can be found through the Civil Service website.

Additional Information