Research Engineer – Human Influence

About this role

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. The deadline for applying to this role is Sunday 11th October 2026, end of day, anywhere on Earth. Team Description The Human Influence (HI) team focuses on the ways in which AI can influence human beliefs, decisions, and behaviour. A substantial class of AI risk operates through people.

AI systems can persuade people to change their beliefs and to take action; can build trusting relationships with people in order to exploit them; can extract private information from them; and can hold delegated ownership of high-stakes decisions. Our work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods from computational social science, AI safety and security, cognitive and behavioural science, machine learning, and data science.

Typical projects include running rigorous human-AI interaction studies and randomised controlled trials, building evaluations and benchmarks that track AI capabilities across model releases, eliciting model capabilities through fine-tuning and self-play, and developing datasets to monitor real-world risk exposure and severity. Role Description We are looking for a Research Engineer to join the Human Influence team . Successful candidates will be strong researchers and engineers with a track record of carrying out scalable work in LLM post-training and fine-tuning , especially with Reinforcement Learning ; or w ith comparable expertise in engineering and validating large-scale evaluation pipelines.

Projects the Research Engineer might deliver include: Designing and building a Reinforcement Learning environment a imed at mitigating a model’s ability to e.g. deceive a user i n a one-to-one conversation or within multi-agent threads. Leveraging state-of-the-art interpretability methods to iden tify why models exhi bit con cerning behaviour , and designing mitigations that c an be applied to models irrespective of training regime.