Societal Resilience Data Scientist / Research Scientist

Societal Resilience Data Scientist / Research Scientist

The AI Safety Institute research unit is looking for exceptionally motivated and talented Research Scientists and Data Scientists to join our Societal Resilience team.

Societal Resilience

The goal of the Societal Resilience team is to develop an empirical understanding of the harms that could arise when AI is deployed and used in the real world. It seeks to ensure that society is prepared for, and resilient to, large-scale and high-stakes adoption. To this end, the team will establish systems for collecting and analysing big data relating to AI adoption, usage, and incidents. We will track how businesses, organisations, communities, and individuals are using AI, with a focus on emerging large-scale risks. With an empirical understanding of these trends developing over time, this team will advise policymakers on risks and invest in mitigations that support societal resilience in the UK.

We are looking for research and data scientists who will help design and execute novel research that furthers this goal. They will be responsible for identifying relevant sources of data, designing methods for collecting and aggregating datasets, creating analytic tools for processing and understanding the data, and disseminating results through reports, publications, and other vehicles.

The Societal Resilience team is a strongly collaborative technical research team, led by the Societal Impacts Research Director, Professor Christopher Summerfield. Youll also have the opportunity to regularly interact with our highly talented and experienced staff across the Institute (including alumni from Anthropic, DeepMind, OpenAI, and ML professors from Oxford and Cambridge), as well as with other partners across government.

Person Specification

Successful candidates will help us design research and analyze data relating to how AI is being deployed in the real world. This will include consumer AI usage data, measurements of societal uptake and adoption, and AI incident monitoring. This role requires someone who can be strategic, creative, and ambitious. They will be adept at identifying valuable sources of information, thinking creatively about data, and have excellent communication skills. We would be particularly excited to hear from people who have some or all of the following:

1. Experience of researching the uptake, adoption, and usage of frontier AI in the real world (in both individual and enterprise contexts)
2. Experience working with frontier model architectures or frontier model training
3. Excellent quantitative and coding skills
4. Significant experience of doing technical analysis, especially in SQL and Python
5. Experience in trust and safety and/or have worked closely with policy, enforcement, and engineering teams
6. Experience with data engineering, such as building core tables or writing data pipelines (not expected to build infrastructure or write production code)
7. Have experience scaling and automating processes, especially with language models
8. Demonstrable record of answering complex questions by bringing together multiple sources of data
9. Independent thinker, willing to challenge accepted orthodoxies
10. Great team spirit
11. Evidence of delivery and dissemination, including presenting data in compelling ways to senior decision makers

Salary & Benefits

We are hiring individuals at all ranges 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. The full range of salaries are available below, salaries comprise of a base salary, technical allowance plus additional benefits as detailed on this page.

1. Level 3 - Total Package £65,000 - £75,000 inclusive of a base salary £35,720 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £29,280 - £39,280
2. Level 4 - Total Package £85,000 - £95,000 inclusive of a base salary £42,495 plus additional technical talent allowance of between £42,505 - £52,505
3. 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
4. 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
5. Level 7 - Total Package £145,000 inclusive of a base salary £68,770 plus additional technical talent allowance of £76,230

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.

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

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