Department for Science, Innovation and Technology
Engineering Lead, Chem Bio
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Job Summary
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.
About The Team
AISI’s Chem-Bio team conducts technical research to assess evolving AI capabilities related to scientific R&D and chemical and biological misuse, as well as 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 chem-bio policy specialists and talented generalists — who work closely with other technical and policy teams across government.
Job Description
Role Description
The Chem-Bio team is building a dedicated engineering capability to support a growing portfolio of high-impact technical research. We are looking for an exceptional Engineering Lead to help build and lead this capability.
This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who enjoys designing and building robust systems in a research-heavy environment. You will lead technical delivery for shared platforms, tooling, and infrastructure that enable Chem-Bio research, while also leading the CB team’s engineers and helping establish strong engineering practices.
You will work closely with researchers to translate ambiguous, fast-evolving requirements into reliable internal tools and systems. You should be excited by both building things yourself and helping others do their best work.
What You Might Work On
Working in Chem-Bio, you might:
- Build platforms that allow researchers to run evaluations and experiments quickly, reliably, and safely across a range of agentic and model-based systems
- Develop shared infrastructure for science-oriented AI research, including support for language models, multimodal models, specialist chemical or biological workflows, and large-scale experiment management
- Support the design and deployment of systems used to study model capabilities, safeguards, and misuse risk in high-stakes scientific domains
- Partner with researchers to turn ambiguous technical requirements into robust internal tools, frameworks, and reusable components
- Coordinate with other engineering teams at AISI to adopt common infrastructure where appropriate and develop bespoke solutions where needed
As Engineering Lead, You Will:
- Lead technical delivery for Chem-Bio engineering — define priorities for shared platforms, tooling, and infrastructure, and ensure engineering work is aligned with the team’s research needs
- Shape strategy of the wider Chem-Bio team – take a leadership role for the team’s wider technical strategy alongside the Workstream Leads
- Design and build critical systems — architect, implement, and maintain the internal tools and infrastructure that support experiments, evaluations, and analysis
- Work closely with researchers — understand varied technical needs across Chem-Bio workstreams and translate them into well-engineered, maintainable solutions
- Support and guide the team’s engineers — provide day-to-day technical leadership, feedback, and coaching, and help create a high-trust, effective team environment
- Shape engineering standards and ways of working — improve code quality, testing, documentation, reliability, security, and maintainability in a fast-moving research setting
- Contribute to technical planning — help identify common engineering needs across projects, break down work, and ensure effort is focused on high-value problems
- Work across classification systems – build out the team’s access to and work on secure compute
- Coordinate across AISI engineering teams — work with Core Technology and other teams to share infrastructure, align approaches where useful, and avoid unnecessary duplication
- Support hiring as the team grows — contribute to interviewing and candidate assessment, and help define the skills needed in future hires
- Remain hands-on on important technical problems — write code, review designs, unblock delivery, and step into ambiguous or high-priority work where needed
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Person specification
Role Requirements
We are looking for the following skills, experience and attitudes, though successful candidates may not meet every criterion. We can be flexible in shaping the role and salary to your background, expertise, and level of experience.
Strong Candidates Will Typically Have:
- Significant experience building and maintaining complex software systems in Python or similar languages, with a strong track record of technical leadership
- Experience leading technical work in a team, whether as an Engineering Lead, Staff engineer, senior research engineer, tech lead, or similar
- Strong experience designing and operating cloud-based infrastructure and internal platforms, ideally including AWS, containers, infrastructure-as-code, orchestration systems, and CI/CD tooling
- Strong judgement on how to build reliable, maintainable systems in environments with ambiguous requirements and rapidly evolving priorities
- Experience partnering closely with highly technical stakeholders — for example researchers, scientists, product leads, or policy teams — and turning their needs into effective engineering solutions
- Ability to support and develop others, whether through line management, mentoring, or technical leadership
- An understanding of working in a security context and the requirements of leading engineering work across classification systems
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate clearly with both engineers and non-engineers
- A strong sense of mission, urgency, and responsibility for outcomes, including willingness to operate hands-on when needed
We would be especially excited by candidates with experience in one or more of:
- Research engineering or infrastructure for ML/AI teams
- LLM-based systems, model serving, evaluation frameworks, agent systems, or ML tooling
- Computational biology, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, or scientific software/infrastructure
- Secure infrastructure, access controls, auditing, or engineering in sensitive or regulated environments
- Building internal developer platforms or shared tooling for multi-team technical organisations
- Working in interdisciplinary environments combining software engineering with scientific, policy, or operational stakeholders
Other Core Requirements
Please note that this is a reserved post. We can only consider applications from UK nationals (including dual nationals who hold British citizenship). Appointment is conditional on successfully completing UK Government SC clearance. Prior clearance is not required — we will sponsor and support you. You should normally have been resident in the UK for the past 5 years. You may also be required to undergo Developed Vetting (DV). DV typically requires a longer period of UK residency (around 10 years). Employment is conditional on obtaining and maintaining the required clearance(s). More detail on clearance eligibility can be found on the UK Government website: National security vetting: clearance levels - GOV.UK
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You should be able to spend at least 9 days per fortnight working with us.
You should be willing to work from our office in London (Whitehall) at least 3 days/week.
Technical skills
We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:
Successful candidates will be invited to a 45 minute technical/ strategy conversation where we will delve in to the candidates fit for the position. Details will be send to candidates in advance.
Alongside your salary of £74,605, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £21,613 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).
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 employer contribution of 28.97%.
- 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.
- A hybrid office/home based working model where staff will spend a norm of 40-60% of their time in the office (minimum of 40%) over a month with flex dependent on balancing business and individual need.
Office attendance
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.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.
Selection process details
This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Experience and Technical skills.
Candidates will be required to submit a CV that fits the essential criteria for the position. Successful candidates will be invited to a 45 minute technical/ strategy conversation where we will delve in to the candidates fit for the position
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