Technical and Translational Lead - Safeguarded AI (Cybersecurity)

ARIA is a new R&D funding agency built to unlock technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. We fund scientists and engineers to pursue research at the edge of the possible.

From climate change to AI, society faces enormous challenges and opportunities that can be uniquely addressed by science and technology. ARIA was created to activate the UK’s world-class R&D in new ways, so we can meet these head on.

Our success is shaped by one question: how will ARIA transform the lives of the UK’s future generations? Whether that’s a life-changing new technology or a burgeoning new industry, it should be obvious that ARIA played a catalytic role.

If you want to help make breakthroughs like these possible, come and build ARIA with us.

Learn more here.

Role Summary

ARIA is looking for a Technical and Translational Lead to help drive the execution of a £20m funding call on AI-enabled formal methods for cybersecurity, part of ARIA’s Safeguarded AI programme.

ARIA’s Safeguarded AI programme, backed by ~£60m, aims to radically expand what is possible through AI-enabled mathematical modelling and formal verification, with the goal of producing formally verified artefacts for consequential cyber and cyber-physical systems.

In this  £20m cybersecurity call, we will fund teams to build high-impact, security-critical software components whose key properties are backed by machine-checked proofs and tested through coordinated red-team exercises. The programme is built around fast 8-week cycles: 6 weeks of build-and-verify, 1 week of adversarial red-teaming, and 1 week of review and retargeting.

The ambition is not only to push the technical frontier of AI-enabled formal methods, but to establish credible routes to deployment in real, societally critical systems.

We are looking for someone who can help make this machinery work in practice: driving sprint execution, sharpening technical targets and assurance claims, engaging operational stakeholders, and helping teams move toward field trials and adoption. The role exists to ensure the funding call does not merely produce interesting verified artefacts, but moves toward high-leverage, red-teamed, deployment-relevant cyber-defence systems.