The UK AI Security Institute is the world's largest and best-funded team dedicated to understanding the capabilities and impacts of advanced AI and developing practical risk mitigations. We’re in the heart of the UK government with direct lines to No. 10, 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, agility and international influence, this is the best place to shape both AI development and government action to ensure AI systems are deployed safely and responsibly.
Risks from misaligned AI systems will grow in importance as AI systems become more capable, autonomous, and integrated into society. AI control measures seek to detect, constrain, and/or counteract potentially misaligned AI models; we expect these measures to become increasingly important in the face of capable AI systems that may be unreliable, deceptive, or misaligned.
The Control Red Team partners with leading frontier AI companies to stress-test control measures. The team uses techniques from adversarial ML to develop algorithms to find a range of failures in control measures, which are then used to assess strengthen control measures. These partnerships allow us to directly influence vital control measures, while our position in government lets us bring our understanding of the state of control measures to broader government as they make critical deployment, research, and policy decisions.
The Control Red Team grew out of our previous work on control, including a library for running AI control experiments, stress-testing asynchronous monitors, chain-of-thought monitorability, evaluating control for LLM agents,practical challenges of control monitoring, and AI control safety cases. The Control Red Team additionally draws from expertise within our broader Red Team, which has world-leading expertise in human-led attacks against AI systems.
Job overview
We're looking for an experienced researcher to lead the Control sub-team, driving its research agenda and managing a team of talented research scientists. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise in AI control and alignment with the leadership ability to set direction, develop people, and represent the team's work to senior stakeholders inside and outside government.
As Sub Team Lead, you will shape the Control sub-team's strategy and priorities with the Red Team lead, mentor junior and senior researchers, and serve as a key point of contact with frontier AI labs, UK government officials, and international partners.
You'll work closely with the broader Red Team leadership – currently led by Xander Davies and advised by Yarin Gal – and collaborate with external teams including Redwood Research, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
Representative projects you might work on:
- Designing, building, running and evaluating methods to automatically attack and evaluate control protocols, such as LLM-automated attacking and optimisation approaches.
- Building and maintaining infrastructure and benchmarks for AI control experiments, including tools for evaluating the robustness of control measures across diverse threat models.
- Performing adversarial testing of frontier AI system control protocols and produce reports that are impactful and action-guiding for deployers.
Person specification
In accordance with the Civil Service Commission rules, the following list contains all selection criteria for the interview process.
The experiences listed below should be interpreted as examples of the expertise we're looking for, as opposed to a list of everything we expect to find in one applicant:
You will be a good fit if you have:
- Hands-on research experience with large language models (LLMs) - such as training, fine-tuning, evaluation, or safety research.
- Experience working on AI alignment or AI control
- An ability to bring your own research ideas and work in a self-directed way, while also collaborating effectively and prioritising team efforts over extensive solo work.
- A demonstrated track record of peer-reviewed publications in top-tier ML conferences or journals.
- Ability and experience writing clean, documented research code for machine learning experiments, including experience with ML frameworks like PyTorch or evaluation frameworks like Inspect.
- A sense of mission, urgency, responsibility for success.
Strong candidates will also have:
- Experience working on adversarial robustness, other areas of AI security, or red teaming against any kind of system.
- Extensive experience writing production quality code.
- Desire to and experience with improving our team through mentoring and feedback.
- Experience designing, shipping, and maintaining complex technical products.
Benefits
Alongside your salary of £47,355, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £13,718 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology offers a competitive mix of benefits including:
- A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
- Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
- A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
- An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
- Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.
Office attendance
The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience.
Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action.
Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
Selection process details
As part of the application process you will be asked to complete a CV. Further details around what this will entail are listed on the application form.
The interview will consist of experience questions.
Sift and interview dates
Sift and interview dates to be confirmed.
Further Information
Reasonable Adjustments
We are proud to be a disability confident leader and we welcome applications from disabled candidates and candidates with long-term conditions.
Information about the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) and some examples of adjustments that we offer to disabled candidates and candidates with long-term health conditions during our recruitment process can be found in our DSIT Candidate Guidance. A DSIT Plain Text Version of the guidance is also available.
We encourage candidates to discuss their adjustment needs by emailing the job contact which can be found under the contact point for applicants section.
If you are experiencing accessibility problems with any attachments on this advert, please contact the email address in the 'Contact point for applicants' section.
If successful and transferring from another Government Department a criminal record check may be carried out.
New entrants are expected to join on the minimum of the pay band.
A location based reserve list of successful candidates will be kept for 12 months. Should another role become available within that period you may be offered this position.
Candidates who meet the minimum benchmark may be placed on a Reserve List for consideration for similar roles, including those at a lower grade. Candidates who narrowly miss the benchmark and are not placed on the Reserve List may still be considered for an offer in a similar role at a lower grade.
Please note terms and conditions are attached. Please take time to read the document to determine how these may affect you.
Any move to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare; for further information visit the Childcare Choices website.
DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e. working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home).
DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign. DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify.
In order to process applications without delay, we will be sending a Criminal Record Check to Disclosure and Barring Service on your behalf.
However, we recognise in exceptional circumstances some candidates will want to send their completed forms direct. If you will be doing this, please advise Government Recruitment Service of your intention by emailing [email protected] stating the job reference number in the subject heading.
Applicants who are successful at interview will be, as part of pre-employment screening, subject to a check on the Internal Fraud Database (IFD). This check will provide information about employees who have been dismissed for fraud or dishonesty offences.
This check also applies to employees who resign or otherwise leave before being dismissed for fraud or dishonesty had their employment continued. Any applicant’s details held on the IFD will be refused employment.
A candidate is not eligible to apply for a role within the Civil Service if the application is made within a 5 year period following a dismissal for carrying out internal fraud against government.
Existing Civil Servants and applicants from accredited NDPBs are eligible to apply,and can be considered on loan basis (Civil Servants) or secondment (accredited NDPBs). Prior agreement to be released on a loan basis must be obtained before commencing the application process. In the case of Civil Servants, the terms of the loan will be agreed between the home and host department and the Civil Servant. This includes grade on return.
Feedback
For further information on National Security Vetting please visit the Demystifying Vetting website.
Please be aware the levels of national security clearance are changing which may impact on the level needed for this role by the time of appointment. All efforts will be made to keep candidates informed of any changes and what that will mean in terms of vetting criteria. For more information please See our vetting charter.
Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.
People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.
Nationality requirements
This job is broadly open to the following groups:
- UK nationals
- nationals of the Republic of Ireland
- nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
- nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
- individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
- Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service
Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window).
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).
Apply and further information
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Contact point for applicants
Job contact
Recruitment team
Further information
Appointment to the Civil Service is governed by the Civil Service Commission’s Recruitment Principles. If you feel that your application has not been treated in accordance with the recruitment principles, and wish to make a complaint, then you should contact in the first instance [email protected].
If you are not satisfied with the response that you receive, then you can contact the Civil Service Commission. For further information on bringing a complaint to the Civil Service Commission please visit their web pages at: https://civilservicecommission.independent.gov.uk/contact-us/.
Attachments
DSIT T&Cs v1.2 - Opens in new window (docx, 179kB)
