Skills

Python Data Warehousing Monitoring Test Research Programming

Job Specifications

Applications deadline: We accept submissions until 15 January 2026. We review applications on a rolling basis and encourage early submissions.

About The Opportunity

We’re looking for Backend Software Engineers who are excited to build tools for frontier AGI safety research, e.g. building and maintaining evals libraries and tools for monitoring and controlling our own LLM traffic.

REPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS

Here is a list of example projects which you might build and ship in your first 6 months.KEY REQUIREMENTS

Internal tooling for efficiently running and analyzing evaluations. For example, a tool that quickly investigates thousands of agentic eval runs in parallel and surfaces interesting information automatically- Automated evaluation pipelines to minimize the time from getting access to a new model for pre-deployment testing to analyzing the most important results and sharing them- Orchestration tools that allow researchers to run thousands of agentic evaluations in parallel on remote machines with high security and reliability- LLM proxy service that enables us to monitor all of our coding agent traffic in real time and identify undesired behavior automatically (in the spirit of Control)- LLM agents and MCP tools to automate internal software engineering and research tasks, with sandboxes to prevent major failures- CI pipeline optimisations to reduce execution time and eliminate flaky tests- Telemetry API and instrumentation of our existing tools, allowing us to monitor usage and improve reliability- Data warehousing pipeline and service to store thousands of eval transcripts which researchers can study and build datasets from- Upstream improvements to the Inspect framework and ecosystem, e.g. support for evaluating modern agentic scaffolds.KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Rapidly prototype and iterate on internal tools and libraries for building and running frontier language model evaluations
Lead the development of major features from ideation to implementation
Collaboratively define and shape the software roadmap and priorities
Establish and advocate for good software design practices, codebase health, and coding agent practices
Work closely with researchers to understand what challenges they faceAssist researchers with implementation and debugging of research code
Communicate clearly about technical decisions and tradeoffs
You must have experience writing production-quality python code
We value candidates from diverse backgrounds and recognise that candidates may demonstrate their skills in different ways.
For example, we might be impressed if you have:Led the development of a successful software tool or product over an extended period (e.g. 1 year or more)
Started and built the tech stack for a company, e.g in a start-up
Worked your way up in a large organisation, repeatedly gaining more responsibility and influencing a large part of the codebase
Authored and/or maintained a popular open-source tool or library
Placed in a prestigious programming competition (IOI, ICPC, etc.)
5+ years of professional software engineering experience

The following would be a bonus:Experience working with LLM agents or LLM evaluationsInfosecurity / cybersecurity experienceExperience working with AWSInterest in AI Safety

We want to emphasize that people who feel they don’t fulfill all of these characteristics but think they would be a good fit for the position nonetheless are strongly encouraged to apply. We believe that excellent candidates can come from a variety of backgrounds and are excited to give you opportunities to shine.LOGISTICS

Start Date: Target of 2-3 months after the first interview
Time Allocation: Full-time
Location: The office is in London, and the right next to the London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA) offices. This is an in-person role. In rare situations, we may consider partially remote arrangements on a case-by-case basis.
Work Visas: We can sponsor UK visas

BENEFITS

Salary: 100k - 200k GBP (~135k - 270k USD)
Flexible work hours and schedule
Unlimited vacation
Unlimited sick leaveLunch, dinner, and snacks are provided for all employees on workdays
Paid work trips, including staff retreats, business trips, and relevant conferences
A yearly $1,000 (USD) professional development budget

ABOUT APOLLO RESEARCH

The rapid rise in AI capabilities offer tremendous opportunities, but also present significant risks. At Apollo Research, we’re primarily concerned with risks from Loss of Control, i.e. risks coming from the model itself rather than e.g. humans misusing the AI. We’re particularly concerned with deceptive alignment / scheming, a phenomenon where a model appears to be aligned but is, in fact, misaligned and capable of evading human oversight. We work on the detection of scheming (e.g. building evaluations), the science of scheming (e.g. model organisms), and scheming mitigations (e.g. anti-scheming, and control). We closely work with multiple frontier AI companies, e.g. to test their models before deploy

About the Company

Apollo Research is an AI safety organization. We specialize in auditing high-risk failure modes, particularly deceptive alignment, in large AI models. Our primary objective is to minimize catastrophic risks associated with advanced AI systems that may exhibit deceptive behavior, where misaligned models appear aligned in order to pursue their own objectives. Our approach involves conducting fundamental research on interpretability and behavioral model evaluations, which we then use to audit real-world models. Ultimately, our... Know more