Engineering Lead - Human Influence

<div class="content-intro"><h2>About the AI Security Institute</h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p></div><h2><strong><span data-contrast="none"><span data-ccp-parastyle="heading 2">The deadline for applying to this role is Sunday 11th October 2026, end of day, anywhere on Earth.&nbsp;<br></span></span></strong><strong><span data-contrast="auto"><br>Team</span></strong><span data-ccp-props="{}">&nbsp;<strong>Description</strong></span></h2> <p><span data-contrast="none">The Human Influence (HI) team focuses on the ways in which AI can influence human beliefs, decisions, and behaviour. </span><span data-contrast="auto">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.</span><span data-ccp-props="{&quot;335557856&quot;:16777215,&quot;335559738&quot;:240,&quot;335559739&quot;:240}">&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span data-contrast="none">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.</span></p> <h2><strong>Role Description</strong></h2> <p><span class="TextRun SCXW260952635 BCX8" lang="EN-GB" data-contrast="none"><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW260952635 BCX8">We are </span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW260952635 BCX8">looking </span><span class="NormalTextRun SCXW260952635 BCX8">for </span><span class=&quo