Research Associate in AI for Software Engineering

About us

Join a vibrant world-leading Software Systems research group at the Department of Informatics, King’s College London. We are an international, diverse, and inclusive group of about 40 researchers working on all aspects of software engineering with a particular strength in AI for software engineering, as well as software testing and quality assurance.

About the role

The Department of Informatics at King’s College London is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate to join the GenOracle project, which focuses on advancing automated software testing through Large Language Models (LLMs) and search-based software engineering. The project investigates how AI techniques can support the automation of software testing activities, with a particular focus on automated test oracle generation.

The research will explore how modern LLMs can be combined with search-based approaches to improve the effectiveness, scalability, and usability of automated testing techniques. A major focus of the project is the generation of test oracles which are the mechanisms that determine whether software behaves correctly during execution. These oracles may take different forms, including invariant-based oracles, executable assertions, and natural-language-enhanced specifications. The project will investigate how such oracles can be automatically generated, refined, and made more understandable and useful for developers.

The successful candidate will contribute to the design and implementation of novel testing techniques, empirical evaluations of AI-driven software testing approaches, and hybrid methods that integrate LLM-based reasoning with search-based optimisation.

The role will involve implementing research prototypes, designing and conducting large-scale experiments, analysing results, publishing in leading software engineering venues, and contributing to open-source research artefacts. The project also includes collaboration with industrial partners working on automated testing and software migration, providing opportunities to evaluate the developed techniques in practical software engineering settings.

The researcher will join the vibrant and world-leading Software Systems (SSY) group at King’s College London.

This is a full time post (35 Hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract until 20/09/2028.