Software Engineering Manager - Core Technology Team

London, UK

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\u2019re in the heart of the UK government with direct lines to No. 10, and we work with frontier developers and governments globally.

We\u2019re here because governments are critical for advanced AI going well, and AISI is uniquely positioned to mobilize them. With our resources and the UK government\'s unique agility and international influence, this is the best place to shape both AI development and government action.

Role Description

The AI Security Institute\'s Research Unit is looking for motivated and talented Engineering Managers to join AISI\'s Core Technology Team. We are looking for exceptional candidates to lead small teams on a range of critical research-oriented software and infrastructure.

In this role, you\u2019ll work with a talented and highly-motivated team on cutting-edge technologies, helping solve research problems with real-world impact. You\u2019ll 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 the Core Technology Team

The 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.

Working within the Core Technology Team, 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 Inspect\'s plugin ecosystem
• Assist with an evaluation testing exercise of a frontier AI model, debugging issues that appear in Inspect from API changes in the lab\'s latest SDK

As an engineering manager, you will also:

• Support engineers at varying levels with career growth and coaching
• Work with your team and other leads to develop roadmaps and priorities
• Collaborate with managers and leads across AISI to come up with technologies to support new kinds of research
• Look after your team\'s wellbeing and pyschological safety

Person Specification

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

• Leading a small developer team, either as manager or tech lead.
• Line management of software engineers, ranging from junior-level to staff.
• 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 don\'t meet all the above criteria.

Required Experience

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

• Verbal communication
• Teamwork
• Writing production quality code
• Writing code efficiently
• Python
• Interpersonal skills

Desired Experience

We additionally may factor in experience with particular areas like:

• Cybersecurity expertise

Salary & Benefits

We are hiring individuals at all ranges of seniority and experience within this research unit. The advertised range will be explained by your dedicated talent partner as you move through our assessment process. The full range of salaries is available below, comprising a base salary, technical allowance plus additional benefits as detailed on this page.

• Level 3 - Total Package £65,000 - £75,000 inclusive of a base salary £35,720 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £29,280 - £39,280
• Level 4 - Total Package £85,000 - £95,000 inclusive of a base salary £42,495 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £42,505 - £52,505
• Level 5 - Total Package £105,000 - £115,000 inclusive of a base salary £55,805 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £49,195 - £59,195
• Level 6 - Total Package £125,000 - £135,000 inclusive of a base salary £68,770 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £56,230 - £66,230
• Level 7 - Total Package £145,000 inclusive of a base salary £68,770 plus additional technical talent allowance of £76,230

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.

In accordance with the Civil Service Commission rules, the following list contains all selection criteria for the interview process.

Additional Information

We are committed to fair and open competition and equality of opportunity. We recruit on merit and value diversity. Candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum criteria are encouraged to apply. For more information on diversity and inclusion at AI Security Institute, you can contact active.campaigns@dsit.gov.uk.

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