UX Engineer - AI Safety Institute-Department for Science, Innovation & Technology
Government Digital & Data -
UX Engineer - AI Safety Institute
Department for Science, Innovation & Technology
Apply before 11:55 pm on Wednesday 28th August 2024
Details
Reference number
343141
Salary
£85,000 - £115,000
Base salary of between £42,495 (L4) - £55,805 (L5) which is supplemented with an allowance between £42,505 to £54,781
A Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 27%
Job grade
Other
L4, L5
Contract type
Fixed term
Temporary (not fair and open)
Loan
Secondment
Length of employment
12 to 24 months
Business area
AI Safety Institute
Type of role
Information Technology
Working pattern
Flexible working, Full-time, Part-time
Number of jobs available
1
Contents
Location
London
About the job
Job summary
The AI Safety Institute is the first state-backed organisation focused on advanced AI safety for the public interest. We launched at the AI Safety Summit because we believe taking responsible action on this extraordinary technology requires a capable and empowered group of technical experts within government.
Our staff includes senior alumni from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, start-ups and the UK government, and ML professors from Oxford and Cambridge. We are now calling on the world’s top technical talent to build the institute from the ground up. This is a truly unique opportunity to help shape AI safety at an international level.
We have ambitious goals and need to move fast.
Develop and conduct evaluations on advanced AI systems
We will characterise safety-relevant capabilities, understand the safety and security of systems, and assess their societal impacts.
Drive foundational AI safety research
We will launch moonshot research projects and convene world-class external researchers.
Facilitate information exchange
We will establish clear information-sharing channels between the Institute and other national and international actors. These include stakeholders such as policymakers and international partners.
Our Inclusive Environment
We are building an inclusive culture to make the Department a brilliant place to work where our people feel valued, have a voice and can be their authentic selves. We value difference and diversity, not only because we believe it is the right thing to do, but because it will help us be more innovative and make better decisions.
What we Value:
- Diverse Perspectives: We believe that a range of experiences and backgrounds is essential to our success. We welcome individuals from underrepresented groups to join us in this crucial mission.
- Collaborative Spirit: We thrive on teamwork and open collaboration, valuing every contribution, big or small.
- Innovation and Impact: We are dedicated to making a real-world difference in the field of frontier AI safety and capability, and we encourage innovative thinking and bold ideas.
Job description
About the Role
Our Platform Engineering team is enabling our core work of evaluating cutting edge advanced AI Systems. This requires a mix of skills: Creating expert interfaces and highly accessible red-teaming frontends, providing fast and secure inference channels for internal and external models, as well as MLOps capabilities for hosting and fine-tuning our own models.
This is a cross-functional team that collaborates closely with scientists, domain experts, and research engineers to develop brand new evaluation tools that leverage emerging research, while maintaining high levels of privacy and security integrity.
We will be working with a mixture of our own custom and open-source evaluation, analysis and visualisation frameworks.
While much of our work will require prototyping and proving out completely new approaches, our expectation is to ultimately deliver a rock-solid core platform that the rest of AISI can depend on.
You will be expected to bring your own experience and opinions when it comes to software architecture, and the design of the user-facing parts of our evaluations platform.
On any given day you will be interacting with researchers, research engineers, UX designers or our operations team to define requirements, turn those requirements into designs, prototypes or production code in collaboration with other engineers, and make sure that our platform is bug-free, stable and covered with a solid amounts of tests to withstand the ever-increasing evaluation traffic.
Existing Civil Servants and applicants from accredited NDPBs are eligible to apply, but will only be considered on loan basis (Civil Servants) or secondment (accredited NDPBs). Prior agreement to be released on a loan basis must be obtained before commencing the application process. In the case of Civil Servants, the terms of the loan will be agreed between the home and host department and the Civil Servant. This includes grade on return.
Person specification
You will need combined experience in a comparable role:
- Web Development
- (Dev) Tools Development
- Application Frontend Development
- UX Design
- UX Research
We highly encourage generalists to apply but there is no need to check all the boxes.
This role may be a great fit if you:
- Deeply care about the experience of a diverse range of users, from machine learning researchers and domain experts to a group of human evaluators of advanced AI Models
- Have demonstrable expertise in UX design principles and methodologies, preferably with a focus on creating intuitive and user-centric interfaces for complex expert workflows
- Have experience in developing and maintaining design systems and standards, ensuring consistency and usability across various machine learning tools and platforms
- Are proficient in developing wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs using tools like Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD
- Have some experience in conducting user research, usability testing, and gathering feedback to refine the design of the tools and interfaces you create
- Have expertise in front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python) which enable you to implement tools and interfaces yourself in cases where you quickly need to build an MVP for internal users
- Have a proven track record of working closely with both other software developers and designers, but also expert users who have very different backgrounds (such as machine learning or social science researchers)
- Work autonomously and in a self-directed way with high agency, thriving in a constantly changing environment and a steadily growing team, while figuring out the best and most efficient ways to solve a particular problem
- Bring your own voice and experience but also an eagerness to support your colleagues together with a willingness to do whatever is necessary for the team’s success and find new ways of getting things done within government
- Have a sense of mission, urgency, and responsibility for success, demonstrating problem-solving abilities and preparedness to acquire any missing knowledge necessary to get the job done
In addition, we value (but do not require) experience with Machine Learning Research:
- Experience with Machine Learning Interfaces applications or tools
- Experience collaborating with machine learning researchers and data scientists to understand their needs and translate them into functional frontend solutions
- Familiarity with backend technologies (e.g., Python, Node.js) and machine learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch), to better integrate frontend tools with ML models and data processing pipelines
Core requirements
- You should be able to spend at least 4 days per week on working with us
- You should be able to join us for at least 12 months
- You should be able work from our office in London (Whitehall) for parts of the week, but we provide flexibility for remote work
Benefits
Alongside your salary of £85,000, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £11,473 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.
