Expression of Interest- Red Team

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.

Expression of Interest - Red Team
Our Red Team is open to expressions of interest from talented research engineers and scientists who want to work at the forefront of frontier AI safety and security but do not see a role listed that matches their skills and experience. Our talent team will reach out should a role arise that may be a good match.

Team Description
Our Red Team conducts cutting edge research to identify, evaluate and stress test vulnerabilities in frontier AI systems, sharing our findings directly with leading AI companies, UK officials and allied governments to inform deployment, research and policy decisions.
The Red Team is composed of three specialised sub teams, each tackling a distinct set of challenges. While each sub team has its own focus, we work closely together, sharing methodologies, tooling, research insights and findings across the wider Red Team. Many of our most impactful projects draw on expertise from across all three sub teams, and we actively encourage collaboration in working to tackle the most pressing challenges in frontier AI safety and security.

Alignment
The Alignment sub-team focuses on detecting, evaluating and understanding misalignment in frontier AI systems. Our work centres on loss of control risks, including deceptive alignment, research sabotage and self-exfiltration attempts. We carry out novel research to develop techniques for finding misalignment, investigate how to attribute misaligned behaviour to more fundamental concerns such as instrumental convergence, and conduct pre and post deployment evaluations. We share our findings with frontier AI companies and with the UK and allied governments to inform deployment, research and policy making, and we work directly with safety teams at frontier labs to help improve their alignment training and monitoring methodologies.

Misuse
The Misuse sub-team focuses on stress testing frontier AI safeguards for dangerous capabilities, researching novel attack vectors and developing advanced automated attack tooling. Our work probes the robustness of safeguards against real world threats, helping to identify where frontier systems may be vulnerable to exploitation and where defences need to be strengthened. We share our findings with frontier AI companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind, as well as with key UK officials and other governments, to inform their deployment, research and policy decisions and to support the development of more resilient safeguards across the frontier AI ecosystem.

Control
The Control sub-team partners with leading frontier AI companies to stress test control measures designed to prevent AI systems from causing harm. Drawing on techniques from adversarial machine learning, we develop algorithms to uncover a wide range of failures in control measures and use these findings to assess and strengthen them. These partnerships allow us to directly influence vital control measures, while our position within government enables us to bring our understanding of the current state of control measures to wider government as critical deployment, research, and policy decisions are made.

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-resourced public-interest research team focused on AI security.

Resources & access

• Pre-release access to multiple frontier models and ample compute.
• Extensive operational support so you can focus on research and ship quickly.

• Work with experts across national security, policy, AI research and adjacent sciences.

Growth & autonomy

• If you’re talented and driven, you’ll own important problems early.
• 5 days off and annual stipends for learning and development, and funding for conferences and external collaborations.

• Freedom to pursue research bets without product pressure.
• Opportunities to publish and collaborate externally.

Life & family*

• Modern central London office (cafes, food court, gym), or where applicable, option to work in similar government offices in Birmingham, Cardiff, Darlington, Edinburgh, Salford or Bristol.
• Hybrid working, flexibility for occasional remote work abroad and stipends for work-from-home equipment.

• At least 25 days’ annual leave, 8 public holidays, extra team-wide breaks and 3 days off for volunteering.
• Generous paid parental leave (36 weeks of UK statutory leave shared between parents + 3 extra paid weeks + option for additional unpaid time).

• On top of your salary, we contribute 28.97% of your base salary to your pension.
• Discounts and benefits for cycling to work, donations and retail/gyms.
  

*These benefits apply to direct employees. Benefits may differ for individuals joining through other employment arrangements such as secondments.

Salary

Annual salary is benchmarked to role scope and relevant experience. Most offers land between £65,000 and £145,000 made up of a base salary plus a technical allowance (take-home salary = base + technical allowance). An additional 28.97% employer pension contribution is paid on the base salary.

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.

The full range of salaries are available below:

• Level 3: £65,000–£75,000 (Base £39,850 + Technical Allowance £25,150–£35,150)
• Level 4: £85,000–£95,000 (Base £47,355 + Technical Allowance £37,645–£47,645)
• Level 5: £105,000–£115,000 (Base £61,620 + Technical Allowance £43,380–£53,380)
• Level 6: £125,000–£135,000 (Base £74,605 + Technical Allowance £50,395–£60,395)
• Level 7: £145,000 (Base £74,605 + Technical Allowance £70,395)

Additional Information