Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Confidential Computing

Remote: yes Posted: 2026-09-22

THE TEAM

Some of the most consequential decisions of the AI era will depend on answering one question: can we verify what is happening inside AI datacenters? Answering it could unlock international cooperation, help countries protect their sovereignty, and enable trustworthy adoption of AI in high-stakes industries. Building tools that can earn trust across borders is an urgent technical and political challenge.

SASH’s Verification team builds and tests tools to verify agreements about AI. We prototype new verification mechanisms, lead international research collaborations, and work with policymakers around the world to show what these tools can do and inform how they’re used.

You’d join a small team combining technical expertise with international AI policy experience. Our technical team is led by Pascal Berrang, an Associate Professor at University of Birmingham, and brings experience from the Singapore Government. Our policy team brings experience from Oxford and the Centre for the Governance of AI, while our partners include experts from the Future of Life Institute and the University of Oxford.

THE PROBLEM

Verifying what happens inside a datacenter running large AI models is the bottleneck on almost every serious agreement about AI — between states, between a regulator and a lab, between a company and the customers it wants to reassure. The obstacle is always the same shape: the party with something to prove cannot hand over its model weights, and the party doing the checking cannot simply take its word.

One solution to this problem puts its trust in hardware: a trusted execution environment isolates a computation and attests to what ran inside it, so a claim about what happened becomes a claim you can check against a chip. Confidential computing exists on current accelerators and runs near production speed.

That unlocks several problems. An audit tells you something about a model, but nothing connects that result to the weights actually being served — attesting the deployed model by weight hash closes the gap between "this model was evaluated" and "you are talking to the model that was evaluated." The most valuable evaluations are built by people who cannot publish their test set, against models whose weights cannot leave the developer; inside an enclave, neither side has to give way. Logs can be attested where they are produced, making usage auditable after the fact without being readable.

YOUR WORK

You would own the question of what a chip's word is actually worth, and then build the systems that are worth building on top of it.