Technical Writer, Frontier AI Best Practice

The deadline for applying to this role is Sunday 29th November 2026, end of day, anywhere on Earth.

About the team

AISI's Technical Standards and Best Practice team identifies what best practice is needed to manage the most serious risks from frontier AI development and leverages AISI’s position to get it adopted. 

AI capabilities are advancing faster than the science and practices used to manage their risks. Risks now emerge earlier, during training, internal deployment and evaluation, not just at public release, and evaluation methods are struggling to keep pace. Yet there is no consensus on the set of practices needed to safely use and develop the most capable AI systems, and high-level principles are not enough to manage these risks. What's needed is concrete technical guidance that developers agree is necessary. 

AISI is uniquely placed to lead on parts of this industry-wide effort to establish best practice. We house researchers with state-of-the-art technical insight on keeping AI secure during internal use, hold existing relationships with industry and other frontier AI organisations, and offer a neutral third-party home to establish best practice collaboratively. This role directly delivers on part of the Prime Minister’s September 2026 commitment that the UK will work towards principles and standards that ensure the most capable AI systems are developed securely and with appropriate transparency. It builds directly on our October 2026 publication Towards technical best practice for frontier AI development, setting out our view of the most urgent priorities. 

This is a new, growing team with high ambitions. It is a cross AISI initiative that draws on and collaborates with researchers and engineers from across AISI's research teams, as well as our Communications, International and Strategy teams. We're now building a dedicated core team and expect it to grow as the work does. 

Why this team matters:

AISI is uniquely placed to shape this guidance, and this team is how we'll do it: 

• Technical expertise: AISI has roughly 10 technical and research teams whose expertise can be drawn on; one of the largest groups working on AI risk outside the frontier AI companies. AISI has evaluated more than 55 frontier models before release and published research on topics such as safety cases, monitorability and control. 

• A research institute within government: we work directly with leading AI developers, other governments, and third-party evaluators, and can bring them together around practices no single company would set on its own. UK AISI also coordinates the International Network for Advanced AI Measurement, Evaluation and Science – a group of 10 AI security institutes and equivalents – which has already published its own and socialised others’ best practices.  

• A track record of shaping industry practice: AISI has already helped establish voluntary practices such as pre-release testing, and built Inspect, now the standard framework for leading third-party evaluators. 

We're not seeking to mandate requirements. We want to contribute our expertise to an industry-wide effort to develop technical best practice that could later inform formal standards. 

What we're working on:

Examples of our first priority areas include: 

• Overseeing AI systems: what monitoring and controls developers need to make sure AI systems behave as intended, and how to preserve that oversight as systems become more capable. 

• Sharing information on the speed of AI development: which metrics best track progress, including AI's use in its own development, and when they should be shared with governments and the public. 

• Assessing and documenting risk: what risk assessments and safety cases should cover, and what standard of evidence they should meet.