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’re in the heart of the UK government with direct lines to No. 10 (the Prime Minister's office), and we work with frontier developers and governments globally.

We’re 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.

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’ll work with a talented and highly-motivated team on cutting-edge technologies, helping solve research problems with real-world impact. You'll 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

What We Offer

Impact you couldn't have anywhere else

• Incredibly talented, mission-driven and supportive colleagues.
• Direct influence on how frontier AI is governed and deployed globally.
• Work with the Prime Minister’s AI Advisor and leading AI companies.
• Opportunity to shape the first & best-resourced public-interest research team focused on AI security.

Resources & access

• Pre-release access to multiple frontier models and ample compute.
• Extensive operational support so you can focus on research and ship quickly.
• Work with experts across national security, policy, AI research and adjacent sciences.
• If you’re talented and driven, you’ll own important problems early.
• 5 days off learning and development, annual stipends for learning and development and funding for conferences and external collaborations.
• Freedom to pursue research bets without product pressure.
• Opportunities to publish and collaborate externally.

Life & family

• Modern central London office (cafes, food court, gym) or option to work in similar government offices in Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Salford or Bristol.
• Hybrid working, flexibility for occasional remote work abroad and stipends for work-from-home equipment.
• At least 25 days’ annual leave, 8 public holidays, extra team-wide breaks and 3 days off for volunteering.
• Generous paid parental leave (36 weeks of UK statutory leave shared between parents + 3 extra paid weeks + option for additional unpaid time).
• On top of your salary, we contribute 28.97% of your base salary to your pension.
• Discounts and benefits for cycling to work, donations and retail/gyms.

Annual salary is benchmarked to role scope and relevant experience. Most offers land between£65,000and£145,000(base plus technical allowance), with 28.97% employer pension and other benefits on top .

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 full range of salaries are as follows:

Selection Process

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

Additional Information

The Diversity questions section contains standard equality, diversity and inclusion questions. If you have any questions, you may contact active.campaigns@dsit.gov.uk

Apply for this job

indicates a required field

First Name *

Last Name *

Email *

Phone

Country *

Phone *

Resume/CV *

Enter manually

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Enter manually

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Why do you want to join the AI Security Institute? *

How many years of professional experience in programming do you have? * Select...

LinkedIn Profile

Please specify your nationality. *

Do you have the legal right to work in the UK? * Select...

If applicable, please indicate your current visa status and type. *

How did you hear about this role? Select...

UK Diversity Questions

It\'s important to us that everyone at AISI feels an included part of the team, whoever they are and whatever their background. These questions will help us to identify the diversity of our applicants. Should you not wish to provide an answer, you will always have the option to not provide a response with a 'I don\'t wish to answer' option. Your answers will not impact your hiring outcomes whatsoever.
If there are any questions you would like to further discuss or want clarity on, we\'d be happy to talk to you about this if you reach out to active.campaigns@dsit.gov.uk

What is your gender? * Select...

What is your sexual orientation? * Select...

What is your current age group? * Select...

How would you describe your national identity? * Select...

What is your ethnic group? * Select...

What is your religion or belief? * Select...

Would you describe yourself as having a Disability? * Select...