Research Associate

UE07: £40,497.00 - £48,149.00 Per Annum.

CSE / School of Informatics.

Fixed Term Contract - January 2029.

Full Time - 35 Hours Per Week.

Your skills and attributes for success: 

• PhD (or near completion) in Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or a related discipline.
• Experience and evidence of effective independent research work within an interdisciplinary team. More broadly, demonstrated ability to plan and execute a research project, solve problems independently, and make original contributions to a research field. 
• Demonstrated quality of research performance, as evidenced by high-quality publications in top-tier ML and NLP venues (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, WWW, KDD, ICDM, and relevant journals).
• Strong programming skills; experience with Python NLP and deep learning libraries (e.g., Hugging face Transformers, PyTorch, Jax).
• Ability to communicate complex information clearly, orally and in writing, in English.

Click to view a copy of the full job description (opens new browser tab)

Please ensure you include the following documents in your application:

- CV

- Cover letter

The School of Informatics 

The School of Informatics was ranked #1 in the UK for research power in Computer Science and Informatics in the Times Higher Education ranking, based on the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF). The School is one of the largest in Europe, with more than 120 academic staff and a total of over 500 post-doctoral researchers, research students and support staff. We have strong links with industry, with dedicated business incubator space and well-established enterprise and business development programmes. The School is an active Unit in the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), and one of the five founding partners of the UK's Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. This gives rise to opportunities to interact with PhD students, research fellows, and senior researchers within the Alan Turing Institute. Close to the School, the University of Edinburgh has recently established the Bayes Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, providing loci for fruitful multi-disciplinary research and industry collaboration.

The City

Edinburgh is an attractive city: it is walkable, with proximity to nature and features a world-class cultural scene that includes attractions such as the Edinburgh International Festival or the Edinburgh Fringe. Edinburgh was ranked 1st in the 2022 Time-Out Index of the best cities in the world. Their ranking factored in everything from scenic beauty, community spirit, public transport, walk-ability, restaurants, through to cleanliness.

Contact details for enquiries:  Dr Pasquale Minervini (p.minervini@ed.ac.uk, https://www.neuralnoise.com)

As a valued member of our team you can expect: 

• A competitive salary
• An exciting, positive, creative, challenging and rewarding place to work. 
• To be part of a diverse and vibrant international community
• Comprehensive Staff Benefits, such as a generous holiday entitlement, competitive pension schemes, staff discounts, and family-friendly initiatives. Check out the full list on our staff benefits page (opens in a new tab) and use our reward calculator to discover the total value of your pay and benefits 

Championing equality, diversity and inclusion

The University of Edinburgh holds a Silver Athena SWAN award in recognition of our commitment to advance gender equality in higher education. We are members of the Race Equality Charter and we are also Stonewall Scotland Diversity Champions, actively promoting LGBT equality. 

Prior to any employment commencing with the University you will be required to evidence your right to work in the UK. Further information is available on our right to work webpages (opens new browser tab)

Key dates to note

The closing date for applications is 7 April 2025.

Unless stated otherwise the closing time for applications is 11:59pm GMT. If you are applying outside the UK the closing time on our adverts automatically adjusts to your browsers local time zone.

The University is able to sponsor the employment of international workers in this role.  If successful, an international applicant requiring sponsorship to work in the UK will need to satisfy the UK Home Office’s English Language requirements and apply for and secure a Skilled Worker Visa.  

As a world-leading research-intensive University, we are here to address tomorrow’s greatest challenges. Between now and 2030 we will do that with a values-led approach to teaching, research and innovation, and through the strength of our relationships, both locally and globally.