Research Engineer - Societal Impacts

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. It operates in the heart of the UK government, with direct lines to the Prime Minister’s office, and collaborates with frontier developers and governments worldwide.

The Societal Impacts team studies high‑impact societal risks caused by frontier AI deployment. Its mandate is to build a rigorous, world‑class evidence base for the safe and responsible development of frontier AI by identifying risks, measuring impacts, and informing mitigations. The team focuses on how frontier AI influences human beliefs, decisions and behaviour, and where that influence threatens human autonomy and wellbeing.

Themes include how AI changes beliefs and actions, deferral of consequential decisions to AI, AI modelling of mental states, in distinguishability from humans across modalities, and collective dynamics that emerge as AI agents interact with humans and one another.

Successful candidates will be strong researchers and engineers who work with research scientists to design, implement and run experiments that answer important questions about the effects AI will have on society. Illustrative projects might include:

• Implementing a human‑AI interaction study where multiple human and AI participants converse and play a game
• Building an automated pipeline that recruits participants and runs a human‑AI experiment end‑to‑end, tracking how a given capability shifts with each new model release
• Designing and running model evaluations and benchmarks for societal risks such as AI persuasion, deception, or failure to disclose that it is an AI

• Experience writing scalable, maintainable Python code
• Experience in one or more of the following:
  • Data engineering, including data collection, cleaning, processing and visualisation
  • ML engineering, including experience training or evaluating models using PyTorch or a similar library
  • Full‑stack web development
  • Knowledge of machine learning sufficient to understand recent papers in the field
  • Strong verbal communication, experience working on a collaborative research team, and interpersonal skills
  • Demonstrable interest in and understanding of the societal impacts of AI

• Building and maintaining complex data products
• Designing and implementing experiments in human‑AI interaction
• Training or evaluation of frontier AI models
• Research related to societal impacts of AI systems
• A specialisation in a relevant field of social or political science, economics, cognitive science, criminology, security studies, AI safety or another relevant field

• 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 and best‑resourced public‑interest research team focused on AI security

• 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

• 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

• Modern central London office (cafés, 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…