Overview

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, and we work with frontier developers and governments globally.

Role

Software Engineering Manager – Core Technology Team. You will lead small teams on critical research-oriented software and infrastructure within the Core Technology Team, working with world-class researchers and staff, including alumni from Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, Apple, and professors from Oxford and Cambridge.

About The Core Technology Team

The Core Technology Team builds 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.

Responsibilities

• Add a feature to our sandbox plugin system for Inspect to support advanced agentic evals with safe mechanisms for models to write and execute arbitrary code
• Implement support for a new class of open-weights model on our model hosting platform
• Support a research team by designing custom infrastructure for new research projects
• Collaborate with the open-source community on features in Inspect or Inspect's plugin ecosystem
• Assist with evaluation testing of frontier AI models and debug issues in Inspect arising 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 AI Security Institute to adopt technologies that support new kinds of research
• Look after your team's wellbeing and psychological 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 scientists and engineers
• Python experience and understanding 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

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

Desired Experience

• 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. You will be supported through our assessment process to understand our internal benchmarking. The full range of salaries is available below and includes base salary, technical allowance, and additional benefits as detailed here.

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

Other Information

There are pension options available. This role is aligned with frontier AI safety work. Selection processes follow best practices. We are committed to equality and diversity in our recruitment.

Job Details

• Seniority level: Mid-Senior level
• Employment type: Full-time
• Job function: Engineering and Information Technology
• Industries: Government Administration

Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at AI Security Institute by 2x

Get notified about new Software Engineering Manager jobs in London, United Kingdom.