About the AI Safety Institute 

The AI Safety Institute is the first state-backed organisation focused on advancing AI safety for the public interest. We launched at the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit in 2023 because we believe taking responsible action on this extraordinary technology requires a capable and empowered group of technical experts within government.  

We have ambitious goals and need to move fast.  

1. Develop and conduct evaluations on advanced AI systems. We will characterise safety-relevant capabilities, understand the safety and security of systems, and assess their societal impacts. 
2. Develop novel tools for AI governance. We will create practical frameworks and novel methods to evaluate the safety and societal impacts of advanced AI systems, and anticipate how future technical safety research will feed into AI governance. 
3. Facilitate information exchange. We will establish clear information-sharing channels between the Institute and other national and international actors. These include stakeholders such as policymakers and international partners. 

Our staff includes senior alumni from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, start-ups and the UK government, and ML professors from leading universities. We are now calling on the worlds top technical talent to join us. This is a truly unique opportunity to help shape AI safety at an international level. 

As more powerful models are expected to hit the market over the course of 2024, AISIs mission to push for safe and responsible development and deployment of AI is more important than ever. 

 What we value: 

• Diverse Perspectives: We believe that a range of experiences and backgrounds is essential to our success. We welcome individuals from underrepresented groups to join us in this crucial mission. 
• Collaborative Spirit: We thrive on teamwork and open collaboration, valuing every contribution, big or small. 
• Innovation and Impact: We are dedicated to making a real-world difference in the field of frontier AI safety and capability, and we encourage innovative thinking and bold ideas. 
• Our Inclusive Environment: We are building an inclusive culture to make the Department a brilliant place to work where our people feel valued, have a voice and can be their authentic selves. We value difference and diversity, not only because we believe it is the right thing to do, but because it will help us be more innovative and make better decisions. 

As a Testing Technical Lead, you will play a critical role in developing one of AISIs core products: conducting thorough tests of frontier AI systems throughout their development and deployment lifecycle, feeding back results, insights, and recommendations to model developers and policy makers. 

You will be a part of the Testing Team, which is responsible for our overall testing strategy, and the end-to-end preparation and delivery of individual testing exercises. You will collaborate closely with researchers and engineers from our evaluations workstreams who conduct the research and development for our suite of evaluations, as well as policy and delivery teams. Your role will be broad and cross-cutting, involving project management, strategy, and scientific and policy communication.  

The responsibilities of the role include: 

• Planning and leading overall technical delivery of AI system evaluation projects by collaborating with the evaluations workstreams, ensuring that the resulting scientific reports meet our objectives and scientific standards.  
• Ensuring that testing projects have all the research and engineering support needed and are run effectively and efficiently.  
• Defining processes to support testing exercises and creating feedback loops with the evaluations workstreams to drive continuous iteration and improvement in the effectiveness and quality of our testing. 
• Developing, iterating, and ensuring alignment on our overall approach and strategy for evaluating frontier AI systems, including the scope of testing, the structure and quality of our scientific reports, and recommendations for model developers and policy makers. 
• Writing and editing publications such as blog posts, scientific reports, and other materials aimed at diverse audiences, focussing on synthesizing empirical results and recommendations to key decision-makers, ensuring high standards in clarity, precision, and style.  

To set you up for success, we are looking for some of the following skills, experience and attitudes, but we are flexible in shaping the role to your background and expertise. 

• Excellent project management skills, with experience defining milestones, managing dependencies, navigating shifting requirements or tight deadlines, while motivating people. 
• Have relevant experience in industry, startups, or academia and a deep familiarity with technical AI and safety research and its implications for the policy and governance. 
• Knowledge of training, fine-tuning, scaffolding, prompting, deploying, and/or evaluating current cutting-edge machine learning systems such as large language models. 
• Strong problem solving ability, knowing which questions to ask, make technical judgement calls and effectively collaborate with research and engineering teams. 
• Ability to work autonomously and in a self-directed way with high agency, thriving in a constantly changing environment, while navigating broad, ambiguous problems in a pragmatic way. 
• Experience collaborating with and building trust and alignment with world-class multi-disciplinary teams, including both scientists, engineers, and policy makers.
• Proven track record of excellent scientific and policy writing and communication, with ability to understand and communicate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and synthesize scientific results into compelling narratives. Strong attention to detail and dedication to clarity, precision, and style in writing. 

Core requirements 

• You should be able to spend at least 4 days per week working with us.
• You should be able to join us for at least 12 months.
• You should be able work from our office in London (Whitehall) for parts of the week, but we provide flexibility for remote work.

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 average employer contribution of 27%.
• 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.

Job contact :

• Name : [email protected]
• Email : [email protected]

Recruitment team

• Email : [email protected]