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  • Location
  • About the job
  • Benefits
  • Things you need to know
  • Apply and further information

London

About the job

Job summary

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

Our staff includes senior alumni from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, start-ups and the UK government, and ML professors from Oxford and Cambridge. We are now calling on the world’s top technical talent to build the institute from the ground up. This is a truly unique opportunity to help shape AI safety at an international level.

We have ambitious goals and need to move fast.

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.

Drive foundational AI safety research

We will launch moonshot research projects and convene world-class external researchers.

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.

Job description

About the Role

As a Senior Research Scientist at AISI, you will lead Research Scientists and Research Engineers in planning and executing on research directions in foundational AI safety. You’ll lead and contribute to projects aimed at improving the fundamental safety of advanced AI systems, making novel research contributions that are aimed at informing governance with technical tools on safe AI.

We draw on a wide range of disciplines, and value a diversity of research expertise across our four workstreams. You’ll be primarily associated with one of our research workstreams (please specify in your application which you’re most interested in, details below), but sometimes your work will intersect multiple workstreams:

  • Capabilities elicitation & jailbreaking. This workstream consists of research to ensure that AISI can get closer to the “capabilities ceiling” of the models we work with, including development of novel jailbreaks and methods such as “next-gen chain-of-thought" to increase model performance on our evals. 
  • AI model explainability & accountability. This workstream focuses on techniques for improving the transparency of model behaviour via e.g. casual reasoning traces.
  • Interventions on model behaviour. This workstream will investigate ways of intervening on model behaviour pre- and post-deployment to solve safety issues beyond anecdotal patching, i.e. in ways that will be robust to improved prompting techniques. E.g. via data attribution techniques.
  • Rethinking alignment. This workstream consists of developing methods for alignment that go beyond existing state-of-the-art, for example by reliance on formal languages or probabilistic approaches.

You will work under Prof. Yarin Gal, and work closely with your team comprising of multiple Research Scientists, Research Engineers, and Software Engineers, as well as benefit from support from our cross-functional Platform Engineering team. You’ll also collaborate with external topic-level experts, contractors, partner organisations and policy makers to coordinate and build on external research.

Day-to-day, you may:

  • Conduct novel research
  • Supervise Research Scientists in your team and mentor them
  • Design experiments to validate hypotheses about models’ behaviour
  • Work with experts to assemble relevant literature or datasets
  • Prepare papers for internal or external publication
  • Manage external research collaborations
  • Prepare a write-up of your research to brief policy makers

The ideal candidate will have the skills and experience that allow them to additionally:

  • Design experiments to conduct rigorous and impactful machine learning research
  • Analyse and interpret data in ways that meaningfully contribute to research at AISI
  • Understand the capabilities and potential impact of advanced AI systems, including large language models
  • Keep track of and respond to the fast-moving literature, ensuring that our research is additional to that being conducted elsewhere
  • Coordinate closely with research and engineering partners in your team and stakeholders across AISI to design new methods
  • Clearly communicate insights from studies to influence research decisions across stakeholders throughout AISI and DSIT

There will be significant scope to contribute to the strategy of your workstream team and to design experiments with set-ups of increasing complexity.

Existing Civil Servants and applicants from accredited NDPBs are eligible to apply, but will only 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.

Person specification

For the senior research scientist role, you’ll have conducted ML research, research in a domain relevant to your primary workstream, or research at the intersection of your domain and frontier AI systems.

We expect experts in both ML and a specific domain relevant to one of our workstreams to be rare, so we encourage you to apply no matter which research expertise you’re excited to bring to the institute.

We look for the following skills, experience and attitudes:

  • Significant track record of conducting and disseminating rigorous and impactful research
  • Significant experience leading work in AI/ML research
  • PhD or equivalent research experience in a field related to your workstream, or in machine learning. If you have more work experience, you might be assigned a more senior role in the team
  • Experience with large language models, potentially related to prompt engineering, tooling, or fine tuning
  • Possess a strong curiosity in technical understanding of AI systems and studying their limitations
  • Motivated to conduct research that is not only curiosity driven but also solves concrete open questions in AI safety and has a strong grounding for how research may impact governance and policy making
  • Experience of mentoring others in a research setting
  • Statistics expertise (e.g., data analysis)
  • Good technical and coding skills, e.g. Python
  • Strong project management skills and demonstrable experience of teamwork, including building rapport with people from diverse backgrounds

Given the changing nature of the field, it’s most of all important to us to build a team with strong problem-solving skills and a preparedness to acquire any missing knowledge necessary to get the job done.

Owing to the rapid development of advanced AI systems, you will likely be up to date with the latest advancements.

Core requirements

  • You should be able to spend at least 4 days per week on 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

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £105,000, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £14,771 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 average employer contribution of 27% of the base salary.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

  • Name : active.campaigns@dsit.gov.uk
  • Email : active.campaigns@dsit.gov.uk

Recruitment team

  • Email : dsitresourcing.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk

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 DSITrecruitment.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk . 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: Click here to visit Civil Service Commission/Complaints

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