Apollo Research on cord

Apollo Research

AI Security & Control Researcher

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Apollo Research?
Academic/Research · Machine Learning and AI
We are an AI Safety evals research organisation.
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
2 weeks ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: AI Engineer
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: Artificial Intelligence, Security Testing, Threat Detection, APIs, Python
Other skills considered: Machine Learning, Data Protection, Data Security, Privacy

Logistics

Base salary: £135K - £260K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: On-site
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We are looking for a security & control expert to help us design better threat models and control protocols against AI adversaries, and improve the effectiveness and security of Watcher.

This is truly a "start-up role" in the sense that you have significant say in shaping the direction of the role. This is an individual contributor role but could lead to management responsibilities eventually, if desired.


Key Responsibilities

  • Develop threat models for coding agents under the assumption that they could be misaligned or compromised. This includes near-term threats like AI agents leaking private internal data and long-term threats like agents sabotaging safety research.
  • Treat coding agents through the lens of insider risk: they have credentials, access to code, network access, and the ability to execute arbitrary actions, just like a malicious insider would (see Control agenda).
  • Map out kill chains and attack progressions similar to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, adapted for agentic AI. See e.g. the Agentic Loss-of-Control Threat Matrix for an example of a high-quality contribution.
  • Build and maintain our "coding agent security levels" which define what level of robustness Watcher provides against different categories of failure modes. These levels should be concrete, testable, and usable both internally (to guide product priorities) and externally (to communicate our security posture to customers).
  • Maintain our library of coding agent failure modes and keep it comprehensive, accurate, and current.
  • Stay up to date with the academic and industry literature on coding agent security, AI security, and adjacent fields (prompt injection, deception, accidental security implications, supply chain attacks on AI systems, etc.).
  • Design realistic attack trajectories and example exploits for monitor development and backtesting, work with the research team to ensure monitors are trained and evaluated against credible adversarial behavior.
  • Serve as security adjudicator for flagged trajectories. When monitors flag ambiguous agent behavior, determine whether it represents a genuine attack, a benign-but-unusual workflow, or needs deeper investigation, and feed those judgments back into monitor improvement.
  • Red-team and improve Watcher's monitors and policies, document findings, and feed them into product improvement.
  • Work with the technical research staff to build adversarial test suites into the backtesting pipeline.

Representative Projects

  • Develop a comprehensive coding agent threat model: Think deeply about all the ways in which coding agents could attack an organization. Compare this threat model to conventional threats from human insiders. Publish a detailed research piece describing the threat model building on existing research, e.g. from Redwood Research.
  • Improve our database of failure modes: We have an internal database of 50+ failure modes of coding agents with detailed reports for all of them. For this project, you would provide an expert view on the current state of that database and suggest improvements. In the long run, you would maintain that database and be responsible for integration of new failures.
  • Prioritize failure modes that Watcher should cover: Different parts of Watcher attempt to cover different threat models and attack strategies. Based on the results of the threat model project above, we want to ensure that each part of Watcher covers the most important failure modes in the most efficient way. For example, not all monitors require blocking capability and some failure modes might benefit from additional affordances like being able to disperse subagents.

Must-haves

  • 5+ years in security roles in a hands-on technical capacity (not purely GRC/compliance). You need to be able to think structurally about threat modeling and failure modes. You need to be able to read code, understand infrastructure, and evaluate technical controls, not just write policies.
  • Direct experience with security research, threat modeling, or offensive security.
  • Comfortable working in a small, fast-moving team, and comfortable owning ambiguous, open-ended research questions.
  • Strong written communication this role produces threat models, security levels, and failure mode documentation that need to be clear and precise.

Nice-to-haves

  • Experience with AI/ML systems security, LLM security, or AI control research. The field is young enough that deep experience here is rare, but any exposure significantly reduces ramp-up time.
  • Detection engineering, SOC, or incident analysis experience. A part of this role is judging whether flagged agent behavior is genuinely malicious, and people who have triaged real-world alerts might ramp much faster.
  • Familiarity with insider threat programs or insider risk frameworks. The mental model of "the coding agent is a potentially malicious insider" is useful for this role and someone who has worked on insider threats will pick it up faster.
  • Red teaming or offensive security background. Useful for the Watcher red-teaming responsibilities and for thinking adversarially about failure modes.
  • Formal AI safety research background. Helpful but not necessary. We need security practitioners who can learn the AI safety context, not AI safety researchers who need to learn security.

Explicitly not required

  • Management experience. This is an IC role, at least initially.
  • Specific certifications (CISSP, etc.). We care about demonstrated ability, not credentials.

Company Benefits

We offer a competitive UK-based salary with flexible work hours. Enjoy unlimited vacation and sick leave. We also provide lunch, dinner, and snacks on workdays. You'll have the opportunity to join paid work trips such as staff retreats, business trips, and conferences. Additionally, a yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget is available.
AI Security & Control Researcher at Apollo Research
Position posted 2 weeks ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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