Software Engineer - Core Technology

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 Software Engineers to join AISI's Core Technology Team. We are looking for exceptional candidates at all experience levels, from junior through to senior or staff, to work in small teams on a range of critical research-oriented software and infrastructure. In this role, you’ll work with cutting-edge technologies on research problems with real-world impact, and receive mentorship and coaching from your manager and the technical leads on your team. 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 our Core Technology Team AISI 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. As a software engineer on one of these teams, 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 Person Specification You may be a good fit if you have some of the following skills, experience and attitudes: Writing production quality code at fast pace. 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: Writing production quality code Writing code efficiently Python Written communication Verbal communication Teamwork Interpersonal skills Tackling challenging problems Desired Experience We additionally may factor in experience with particular areas like: 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.) 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-res…