Department for Education

Technical Specialist – Multi-Agent Security

Department for Education

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Hybrid

Location: London • United Kingdom

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Salary

💰 £70,000 - £105,000 per year

About the role

  • Act as the technical lead, with the Programme Director and their Programme Specialist, to shape and deliver a bold programme of research aimed at enabling AI agents, both embodied and digital, to coordinate with one another in untrusted settings.
  • Review project proposals, grant applications, assess technical milestones, and stay close to the ground on what’s being built and tested by Creator teams.
  • Plan, lead, and contribute to technical discussions in project meetings, workshops, and formal reviews, bringing depth, challenge, and direction to every interaction.
  • Provide evidence-based technical insight to the Programme Director and the ARIA team to support high-quality decisions and sharpen the programme’s strategic direction.
  • Confidently communicate complex scientific ideas surrounding the programme to stakeholders, from government and funders to key players across the ecosystem.
  • Identify emerging trends and surface the most promising technologies, people, and ideas across the programme and its surrounding opportunity space.
  • Co-author white papers, open calls, and technical reviews that articulate the ambition of the programme and set a clear, compelling vision for external communities.
  • Work closely with the Programme Specialist and Creator teams to drive project delivery, tracking against ambitious technical milestones, benchmarking progress against the state of the art, and spotting opportunities for research cross-pollination to sustain momentum.
  • Be the technical bridge between the Programme Director and functional teams, ensuring execution aligns with the needs of the ecosystem's understanding of the programme.

Requirements

  • You have strong technical foundations in physics, engineering, or similar, that enables you to understand complex systems and "figure out" the constraints of the physical world, even if your primary experience is digital.
  • Proven experience in a "building" role, either as a software/infrastructure engineer at an AI lab, an AI security startup, or a high-level independent developer alongside your primary research. You will have personally written, tested, and shipped complex codebases or AI infrastructure.
  • You have demonstrable applied AI experience; have worked with/on AI already, and have thought deeply about the implications of AI on the world.
  • Demonstrated experience in AI red-teaming, formal verification, or security research. You should have a "hacker’s" intuition for identifying non-obvious failure modes in agentic systems.
  • You have the ability to interrogate the "how" of a project at a granular level, evaluating the technical feasibility of complex milestones (e.g., agentic loops, recursive coordination) from a first-principles engineering perspective.
  • Entrepreneurial, you understand that the impact generated is more important than accolades or following a set process and are willing to start new initiatives and think outside of the box.
  • Independent, you have the ability and track record to reliably take on a project from start to completion, manage it, self-impose standards of excellence, raising your hand when help is needed.
  • You are hungry and ambitious; on a team level, pushing us to think hard about the biggest things we can achieve and ensuring we aim for the moon; on a personal level, setting big goals for yourself that we can help you achieve and support you in.
  • You can uncover non-obvious opportunities and risks, connecting teams, ideas, and research threads in novel ways that drive adoption and translation
  • You comprehend and articulate complex technical concepts and timelines clearly and with conviction, think and communicate with structure, and interrogate ideas effectively.
  • Highly adaptable, you are okay with uncertainty and a fast-paced environment.
  • Experience in robotics, "nature" cryptography, or autonomous systems where digital agents interact with physical hardware/constraints (desirable).
Benefits
  • 27 days annual leave provision, with the option to buy/sell additional days
  • Hybrid working arrangements; 60% in office / 40% at home
  • Supportive environment for learning and development opportunities
  • Enhanced family leave arrangements
  • A free and confidential 24/7 employee assistance programme
  • 2 days of paid volunteer days
  • 5% defined contribution pension scheme with Smart Pension
  • Cycle to Work scheme
  • An excellent office location in Kings X, London
Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools
AI infrastructuresoftware engineeringAI red-teamingformal verificationsecurity researchcomplex codebasesagentic systemsfirst-principles engineeringroboticscryptography
Soft Skills
technical leadershipcommunicationentrepreneurial mindsetindependenceambitionadaptabilitycritical thinkingcollaborationproblem-solvingstrategic insight