About the AI Safety Institute
The AI Safety Institute (AISI), launched at the 2023 Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit, is the world's first state-backed organization dedicated to advancing AI safety for the public interest. Our mission is to assess and mitigate risks from frontier AI systems, including cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, AI-enhanced chemical and biological threats, large-scale societal disruptions, and potential loss of control over increasingly powerful AI. In just one year, we've assembled one of the largest and most respected model evaluation teams, featuring renowned scientists and senior researchers from leading AI labs such as Anthropic, DeepMind, and OpenAI.
At AISI, we're building the premier institution for impacting both technical AI safety and AI governance. We conduct cutting-edge research, develop novel evaluation tools, and provide crucial insights to governments, companies, and international partners. By joining us, you'll collaborate with the brightest minds in the field, directly shape global AI policies, and tackle complex challenges at the forefront of technology and ethics. Whether you're a researcher, engineer, or policy expert, at AISI, you're not just advancing your career – you're positioned to have significant impact in the age of artificial intelligence.
About the Chem/Bio Team
The mission of the Chem/Bio team is to equip policymakers with an empirical understanding of safety-relevant AI capabilities, specifically at the intersection of AI with biology and chemistry.
The team studies AI capabilities including (but not limited to) providing detailed instructions and (multimodal) troubleshooting for chemical or biological lab work, designing new or modified biological agents, and autonomously completing tasks on behalf of the user.
The team works closely with other teams within the AI Safety Institute and wider UK government stakeholders, and external experts, to make sure our research has real-world impacts on AI safety and chemical and biological security through policy recommendations.
Role Summary
As a Research Engineer in the LLM evaluations team of the Chem/Bio workstream, you will develop and run evaluations that measure the ability of LLMs to provide detailed end-to-end instructions and troubleshooting advice for biological/chemical tasks and/or automate key steps of the scientific R&D pipeline. You will collaborate closely with other Research Engineers and receive coaching and mentorship from a Research Scientist with a mixed background in machine learning and biology, as well as our workstream lead who is an established expert in biosecurity.
Your day-to-day work may involve:
- Develop and improve pipelines and frameworks to streamline our automated benchmarking capabilities.
- Collaborate closely with other technical team members, performing code review and solving challenging problems alone or in pair programming sessions.
- Design evaluations for multimodal inputs such as images, video or audio data.
- Research and implement state of the art capabilities elicitation techniques.
- Own and execute LLM testing exercises together with your technical colleagues.
- Evaluate LLM agents for their ability to interact with specialist tools for chemical/ biological science.
- Distill and communicate insights from your work to policy makers and other non-technical audiences.
- Attend talks and journal clubs to keep up to date with the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Person specification
You may be a good fit if you have some of the following skills, experience and attitudes:
- Relevant experience in industry, open-source collectives, or academia in a field related to machine learning, AI or computational biology.
- Experience in writing production-level code that is scalable, robust and easy to maintain, ideally in Python.
- Knowledge of scaffolding, prompting and/or evaluating large language models.
- Strong quantitative skills and a solid understanding of statistics.
- Hands-on experience illustrating and writing up empirical research findings, ideally producing a deliverable such as a blog post or paper.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to engage both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience working in cross-functional teams, including both scientists and engineers.
- Motivated to conduct research that solves concrete open questions in governance and policy making.
- Ability to work autonomously and in a self-directed way with high agency, thriving in a constantly changing environment and a steadily growing team, while figuring out the best and most efficient ways to solve a particular problem.
- Have a sense of mission, urgency, and responsibility for success, demonstrating problem-solving abilities and preparedness to acquire any missing knowledge necessary to get the job done.
The following are also nice-to-have:
- Subject matter expertise in Biology and Chemistry
- Experience in benchmarking frontier AI models
- Open-source software packages or conference contributions
- Experience with working with Protein Design
This post requires Security Clearance (SC) as a minimum, and a willingness to undergo Developed Vetting (DV) if required. This is a UK Nationals only post, as it is a reserved position. More detail on Security Clearances can be found on the UK Government website.
If successful at the interview, AISI will sponsor your clearance application, and you will receive a link to fill out a security questionnaire.
Salary & Benefits
We will discuss and calibrate with you as part of the process. The full range of salaries available for this position is as follows:
- L3: £65,000 - £75,000
- L4: £85,000 - £95,000
- L5: £105,000 - £115,000
There are a range of pension options available which can be found through the Civil Service website.
Selection Process
In accordance with the Civil Service Commission rules, the following list contains all selection criteria for the interview process.
Required Experience
We select based on skills and experience regarding the following areas:
- Writing production quality code
- Writing code efficiently
- Python
- Frontier model architecture knowledge
- AI safety or LLM evaluation experience
- Research problem selection
- Research science
- Written communication
- Verbal communication
- Teamwork
- Interpersonal skills
- Tackle challenging problems
- Learn through coaching
- Technical writing experience - either through academic papers or technical blog posts'
Desired Experience
We additionally may factor in experience with any of the areas that our work-streams specialise in:
- Chemistry or Biology
- Relevant academic publications
Additional Information
Internal Fraud Database
The Internal Fraud function of the Fraud, Error, Debt and Grants Function at the Cabinet Office processes details of civil servants who have been dismissed for committing internal fraud, or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned. The Cabinet Office receives the details from participating government organisations of civil servants who have been dismissed, or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned, for internal fraud. In instances such as this, civil servants are then banned for 5 years from further employment in the civil service. The Cabinet Office then processes this data and discloses a limited dataset back to DLUHC as a participating government organisations. DLUHC then carry out the pre employment checks so as to detect instances where known fraudsters are attempting to reapply for roles in the civil service. In this way, the policy is ensured and the repetition of internal fraud is prevented. For more information please see - Internal Fraud Register.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is Security Check (opens in a new window). See our vetting charter (opens in a new window). People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.
Nationality requirements
UK nationals only
Working for the Civil Service
The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants. We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria. The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.
Diversity and Inclusion
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).
Additional Information
Internal Fraud Database
The Internal Fraud function of the Fraud, Error, Debt and Grants Function at the Cabinet Office processes details of civil servants who have been dismissed for committing internal fraud, or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned. The Cabinet Office receives the details from participating government organisations of civil servants who have been dismissed, or who would have been dismissed had they not resigned, for internal fraud. In instances such as this, civil servants are then banned for 5 years from further employment in the civil service. The Cabinet Office then processes this data and discloses a limited dataset back to DLUHC as a participating government organisations. DLUHC then carry out the pre employment checks so as to detect instances where known fraudsters are attempting to reapply for roles in the civil service. In this way, the policy is ensured and the repetition of internal fraud is prevented. For more information please see - Internal Fraud Register.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check and get baseline personnel security standard (BPSS) clearance before they can be appointed. Additionally, there is a strong preference for eligibility for counter-terrorist check (CTC) clearance. Some roles may require higher levels of clearance, and we will state this by exception in the job advertisement. See our vetting charter here.
Nationality requirements
We may be able to offer roles to applicant from any nationality or background. As such we encourage you to apply even if you do not meet the standard nationality requirements (opens in a new window).
