Research Manager – Alignment

This role sits outside of the DDaT pay framework given the scope of this role requires in depth technical expertise in frontier AI safety, robustness and advanced AI architectures. 

The deadline for applying this role is Sunday 15 June 2025, end of day, anywhere on Earth.

AISI’s alignment team examines ways to prevent models from autonomously attempting to cause harm. The team’s research is led by Geoffrey Irving, AISI’s Chief Scientist – a research agenda can be found here.

This exciting new team is part of AISI’s Solutions Group, which will also examine ways to prevent misuse risks (our Safeguards team) and ways to prevent models from causing harm, even if they are autonomously attempting to do so (our Control team).   

ROLE SUMMARY

In this role, you will be people managing a team of very exceptional and highly motivated individuals, including complexity theorists, game theorists, learning theorists and ML research scientists. You’ll also be growing your team – getting stuck in with sourcing specific people we want, often world-leading experts in their domain, and then helping run the full process and getting them excited about the role.

Within your team you’re expected to provide fantastic management, including building strong relationships with the other team members, as well as giving regular feedback and coaching. You’ll receive mentorship and coaching both from the workstream lead, as well as the broader group of research directors in AISI (people like Geoffrey Irving and Yarin Gal). In addition, we have a very strong learning culture including paper-reading groups and Friday afternoons dedicated to deep learning.

Your team is given huge amounts of autonomy to chase exciting research directions, including:

• Conducting foundational research pushing forward the frontier of our understanding about how to make highly advanced AI systems safe alongside AISI expertise and external collaborators 

• Breaking down the alignment problem by producing safety case sketches for highly-capable AI systems using alignment and scalable oversight techniques 

• Making funding recommendations, finding the best research projects targeting the most important problems to solve – and supervising this external research

Person Specification 

You may be a good fit if you have some of the following skills, experience and attitudes:

• Experience people managing strong research or engineering teams, with well thought-out views on management philosophy and style.
• Experience coaching team members & providing feedback.
• Strong understanding of large language models (e.g. GPT-4). This includes both a broad understanding of the literature, as well as hands-on experience with either research or research engineering.

• Broad knowledge of existing approaches to alignment (T-shaped: some deep knowledge, lots of shallow knowledge).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• A track record of helping teams achieve exceptional things.
• Experience working with world-class multi-disciplinary teams (e.g. in a top-3 AI lab).
• Experience working within a research team that has delivered multiple exceptional scientific breakthroughs, in deep learning (or a related field).
• Strong track-record of academic excellence (e.g. multiple spotlight papers at top-tier conferences).
• Acting as a bar raiser for interviews.

Salary & Benefits 

We are hiring individuals at a range of seniority and experience. Your dedicated talent partner will work with you as you move through our assessment process to explain our internal benchmarking process. For this role, we would expect candidates to be L5 and above. The range of salaries are available below, salaries comprise of a base salary, technical allowance plus additional benefits as detailed on this page.

• Level 5 - Total Package £105,000 - £115,000 inclusive of a base salary £55,805 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £49,195 - £59,195 

• Level 6 - Total Package £125,000 - £135,000 inclusive of a base salary £68,770 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £56,230 - £66,230 

• Level 7 - Total Package £145,000 inclusive of a base salary £68,770 plus additional technical talent allowance of £76,230 

There are a range of pension options available which can be found through the Civil Service website.