Senior Software Engineer, Chem-Bio

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.

AISI's Chem Bio (CB) team conducts technical research to assess evolving AI capabilities related to science R&D and CB misuse, and the effectiveness of technical safeguards that might mitigate risks arising from those capabilities.

The goal of our research is to inform critical decisions on security, opportunities, policy, and risk mitigation made by governments and AI developers.

We're a close-knit, unusually interdisciplinary team—made up of machine learning researchers and engineers, software engineers, virologists and bacteriologists, behavioural research scientists, biosecurity experts, long-standing CB policy specialists and talented generalists—who work closely with other technical and policy teams across government.

• Design and build reliable systems - architect and deliver core platform components that enable researchers to run experiments and ship results quickly, including LLM-based agent systems, evaluation frameworks, and supporting infrastructure.
• Work closely with researchers - translate varied research needs across general agents, science agents, chemical and biological models and other CB work streams into well‑engineered, maintainable systems.
• Own and deliver significant engineering work - take responsibility for substantial technical projects and shared components, driving them from design through implementation, iteration, and maintenance.
• Write high-quality production code - build scalable, robust, and maintainable software, primarily in Python, with strong engineering discipline around testing, documentation, and observability.
• Contribute to engineering standards and practices - help improve code quality, development workflows, and shared engineering approaches within a growing engineering team embedded in a research‑heavy environment.
• Collaborate across AISI - work with our Core Technology and engineering teams to share tooling, align on infrastructure, and avoid duplication.
• Support technical direction - contribute to architectural decisions, identify opportunities to strengthen shared infrastructure, and help make pragmatic technical trade‑offs.
• Mentor others through technical leadership - support other engineers through collaboration, code review, and knowledge sharing, without formal line‑management responsibility.

We are looking for the following skills, experience and attitudes, but a successful candidate will not necessarily need to meet all these criteria. We can be flexible in shaping the role and salary to your background, expertise, and level of experience.

• Significant experience writing production‑level Python code that is scalable, robust, and easy to maintain, with a track record of delivering substantial technical work.
• Strong infrastructure and platform skills - experience with cloud environments (AWS), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and job scheduling (Slurm or similar).
• Experience owning technical projects or major systems as a senior individual contributor. You do not need formal management experience for this role.
• Familiarity with the AI/ML ecosystem:
  OpenAI‑compatible APIs, PyTorch, and the…