Senior Software Engineer, Chem-Bio

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.

We are building a dedicated engineering function within the CB team — a small team that owns the shared platform, tooling, and infrastructure that our research projects depend on. This role is a senior individual contributor within that function. The successful candidate will:

• 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 workstreams 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 tooling around LLM-based systems.
• Ability to work across multiple teams, understanding varied research needs and delivering reliable engineering solutions.
• A sense of mission, urgency, and responsibility for success: Demonstrated ability to solve challenging problems, implement solutions efficiently and acquire any missing knowledge necessary to get the job done. Motivated to build software with direct policy impact.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to work effectively in a dynamic, multidisciplinary team environment.

Strong candidates may also have:

• Experience working in a research environment — you don't need to be a researcher, but you should be comfortable working alongside them and translating ambiguous research requirements into engineering plans.
• Familiarity with computational biology tools, workflows, or datasets.
• Experience building or maintaining internal developer platforms, shared libraries, or CI/CD systems for technical teams.

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.

Other core requirements:

• 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.
• You should be UK-based.