Technical Programme Manager, Cyber & Autonomous Systems

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.

The deadline for applying to this role is Sunday 30th August 2026, end of day, anywhere on Earth.

About the role

AISI aims to turn progress on important research questions in AI security into real insight and impact for our partners and the public. This requires running research programmes that actually deliver, and making these programmes rigorous and fast is its own discipline. The AI Security Institute is hiring a Technical Programme Manager for our Cyber and Autonomous Systems team to do exactly this.

Over the next twelve months, this team will need to move faster, deliver more complex research programmes and evaluations, and engage more deeply with partners in major AI labs and across government than ever before.

Technical Programme Managers make this work possible. You will work directly with the team's researchers and engineers to turn vast research questions into tractable programmes. You will be held responsible for ensuring our research stands up to rigorous empirical standards to inform policy, recommending which technical work needs to happen, and untangling knotty dependencies across workstreams.

About the team

AI capabilities in cybersecurity and autonomy are advancing fast. Frontier models can now work through multi-step cyberattacks, discover and exploit software vulnerabilities, and work independently for days with increasing reliability. These are extraordinary tools for scientific and economic progress but also have the potential for serious harm if misused or deployed without adequate oversight.

The AI Security Institute's Cyber and Autonomous Systems Team (CAST) exists to evaluate the capability of both frontier and open-weight AI models in cybersecurity, autonomy, and AI R&D, ensuring the UK government and its partners have an accurate view of risks and capabilities. We continuously build out more realistic cyber ranges and a CTF suite; run pre-deployment testing of frontier models; and collaborate with our partners across the UK and US governments, frontier AI labs, and the National Cyber Security Centre.

We provide independent, empirical insight into the cyber capabilities of frontier and open-weight models, leveraging our unique position within government and our partnerships with frontier labs. Key examples are our evaluation of Anthropic's Mythos Preview and our research measuring the gap between leading open-weight models and the frontier on cyber capabilities.

What you will own

Programme architecture. You will work directly with your team's technical staff to set the scope of projects: refining what questions we're actually trying to answer, what the milestones and success criteria are for technical work, and how to sequence dependencies, resource, and time across the team. You will turn "we should probably look into X" into a tractable plan with clear deliverables, without imposing process that gets in the team's way. You must be comfortable with ambiguity: you will be immersed in a fast-moving environment and won’t always have a settled roadmap. .

Delivery tracking and unblocking.You will spot and solve problems so that the team's delivery continually improves, and own tracking progress to create visibility and establish control without overhead. You will surface technical blockers before they become crises, intervene directly to resolve them, and know exactly when and to whom to escalate. The goal is the team spending their time on the work, not logistics.

Cross-government technical engagement.You will speak with government partners on a technical level and be a trusted representative and ambassador for good relationships with them.

Team operations and pace.You will determine the operational rhythm that lets a small, high-performing team inside government move at the speed of billion-dollar AI companies. You will ensure the team has what it needs to deliver and be unfussy about doing whatever needs to be done to unblock things and prevent them from falling through the cracks.

Role Requirements

• A track record working with technical colleagues.You have delivered technical programmes in a similarly high-ambiguity environment. You know how to scope and structure open-ended goals (not just deliver against a pre-defined plan). You have earned the trust of technical teams by understanding their work deeply enough to provide critical challenge and engage beyond process.
• Comfort operating at the frontier of AI. You do not need to be a machine learning researcher, but you need to be fluent enough in frontier AI to operate in constant conversation with technical staff about our work, strategy, and research taste; you should have your own taste on what's hard, what's speculative, what's blocked, and what "good" looks like for a given experiment or evaluation.
• High agency and ownership.You take responsibility for outcomes, not activities. When something is stuck, you pick up the phone. You do not wait for someone else to escalate.
• Credibility with technical teams.Researchers trust you because you understand their work, respect their constraints, and demonstrably make their lives easier. You influence through competence and service, not authority or process.
• Strong prioritisation under pressure.You can identify what actually matters on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly level and focus the team's energy. You have the judgement to recognise work that isn't landing and the confidence to recommend that it stop.
• Discretion and judgement in a sensitive domain. You understand that the work we do often carries sensitivity.

Strong candidates may also have:

• Existing security clearances.
• Fluency in, or eagerness to adopt, modern productivity tools (coding agents, Linear, Slack) and willingness to use AI tools as part of daily work.

Selection process

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. We encourage you to apply early.

• Application -CV and a short cover note (max 500 words) explaining what draws you to this role and what you would bring. Please also indicate which team you would prefer to join.