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 organisation 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 research 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.
Control Team
Our team's focus is on ensuring that even if frontier AI systems are misaligned, they can be effectively controlled. To achieve this, we are attempting to advance the state of conceptual research into control protocols and corresponding safety cases. Additionally, we will conduct realistic empirical research on mock frontier AI development infrastructure, to identify flaws in theoretical approaches and refine them accordingly.
Role Summary
Your team will initially include 3-4 research scientists, including researchers with experience in the control agenda and/or experience at frontier labs. Your responsibilities will encompass setting the research direction and agenda, ambitiously advancing the state of control research, as well as managing and developing an exceptional team. The ultimate goal is to make substantial improvements in the robustness of control protocols across major labs, particularly as we progress towards AGI.
Research partnerships with frontier AI labs will be a core part of your role. This will include collaborating on promising research directions (e.g., more realistic empirical experiments in settings that closely mimic lab infrastructure), as well as supporting development of control-based safety cases.
The role will involve close collaboration with our research directors, including Geoffrey Irving and Yarin Gal. From a compute perspective, you will have excellent access to resources from both our research platform team and the UK's Isambard supercomputer (5,000 H100s).
Person Specification
You may be a good fit if you have some of the following skills, experience and attitudes. Please note that you don’t need to meet all of these criteria, and if you're unsure, we encourage you to apply.
- Experience leading a research team or group that has delivered exceptional research in deep learning, or a related field.
- Comprehensive understanding of frontier AI development, including key processes involved in research, data collection & generation, pre-training, post-training and safety assessment.
- Proven track record of academic excellence, demonstrated by novel research contributions and spotlight papers at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR).
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to convey complex ideas clearly and effectively to diverse audiences.
- Extensive experience in collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams, including researchers and engineers, and leading high-impact projects.
- A strong desire to improve the global state of AI safety.
- While existing experience working on control is desired, it is not a requirement for this role.
Salary & Benefits
We are primarily hiring individuals at the more senior ranges of the following scale (L5-L7). The full range of salaries are available below.
- 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
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.
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:
- Research problem selection
- Research science
- Writing code efficiently
- Python
- Frontier model architecture knowledge
- Frontier model training knowledge
- Model evaluations knowledge
- AI safety research knowledge
- Written communication
- Verbal communication
- Teamwork
- Interpersonal skills
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).
