Science and Technology Lead - Multi-Agent Security

About ARIA

What you'll do

• 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.
• Contribute your technical prowess in application areas for robot locomotion (e.g., inspection & maintenance, construction, etc.) and other cutting-edge capabilities within the program, amplifying its overall effectiveness. 
• 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.
• Provide continuity to the opportunity space, and maintain a deep understanding of past and present programmes, and Creator projects, to help new Programme Directors build on what has worked, avoid what hasn’t, and leverage existing technologies and insights.

• Represent the programme, often on behalf of the Programme Director, at events, workshops and talks.
• Support the broader opportunity space by identifying and developing innovative ways to expand it, bringing in new ideas, talent, and opportunities that deliver long-term value beyond the immediate needs of one programme.
• Build trusted relationships with world-class researchers, labs, and founders working at the forefront of the programme’s focus area, as well as the broader opportunity space.
• Work closely with ARIA’s Activation Partners to ensure Creator teams can access the right tools, platforms, and networks to accelerate translation and achieve impact beyond ARIA’s direct reach.
  
  

• Collaborate across ARIA on funding models, budgets, tooling, and operational mechanisms to support effective, flexible funding and programme delivery.
• Contribute as a member of ARIA’s team of Science and Technology Leads, sharing best practices and learnings between programmes to strengthen ARIA’s overall portfolio of work.
• Identify opportunities to expand the opportunity space and build the connective tissue between adjacent spaces.
• Help build and sustain ARIA’s scientific and operational culture.

Who you are

• 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.
• A track record of not just writing papers, but implementing those theoretical findings into working prototypes or tools.
• Practical or research-led experience in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agentic game theory, or designing mechanisms for coordination in untrusted environments.
• Familiarity with "Scaling Trust” primitives such as Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), or programmable cryptography..
• You are obsessed about niche technologies, future technologies, and the future itself.
• 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 have successfully performed technical assignments that require unconventional or novel approaches. 
• You have a strong working knowledge of the UK R&D ecosystem and how to activate relevant parts of it.

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