"Senior Research Associate"

Company Description

Named in honour of Alan Turing, the Institute is a place for inspiring, exciting work and we need passionate, sharp, and innovative people who want to use their skills to contribute to our mission to make great leaps in data science and AI research to change the world for the better.

Please find more information about us here

Position

The Alan Turing Institute’s Defence & National Security Grand Challenge focuses on protecting our country, its people and the places they inhabit, by delivering strategic advantage in AI for the UK and its allies. The Turing is uniquely placed to lead this endeavour, working closely with government partners to strengthen UK defence and security; through world-class research groups advancing the state-of-the-art in AI, dedicated engineering teams translating research into leading-edge deployment-ready capabilities, and policy and governance experts who ensure AI-based capabilities are developed and deployed responsibly. Our independent research, driven by societal impact and public good, is invaluable for our partners, directly tackling the most difficult and impactful real-world challenges they face. In this interdisciplinary, independent and trusted capacity, the Turing also acts as an authoritative convener for diverse expertise in key areas across academia, industry and government

The AiTASHA project

The Turing has recently been awarded a £1m EPSRC research grant to develop AI methods that can support and enhance intelligence analysis for national security and defence. For this project, the Turing will lead an interdisciplinary consortium that also includes Warwick, Southampton, Dundee and Cardiff Universities, working closely with UK government defence and national security partners. The project, entitled “AI Intelligence Triage & Acquisition Support for Human-centred Analysis” (AiTASHA), aims to improve the speed and confidence of intelligence analysts’ assessments by building new AI tools that can work alongside human analysts. Intelligence analysts are routinely required to make high-consequence, defensible assessments from vast, complex and uncertain datasets, to identify indicators and warnings of hostile or malicious activities. Analysts must make these assessments rapidly in a highly pressured and resource-constrained environment, where they face difficult choices of what data to analyse first, and whether to gather additional intelligence, potentially at the cost of delay or increased risk. Addressing this challenge is becoming increasingly urgent as both the scale and complexity of intelligence datasets, as well as the threat posed to UK safety, are growing, and existing AI support tools primarily focus on the identification and visualisation of patterns within datasets, without due consideration of human understanding or context, defensibility, and representation of uncertainty. The goal of this ambitious project is to make fundamental advances that will together underpin and enable a future explainable, defensible AI system that can complement, rather than replace, the work of intelligence analysts; recommending which existing data should be prioritised for human review and which potential new data should be prioritised for acquisition. To address this challenge, we will advance the state-of-the-art across multiple component disciplines; in interpretable multimodal deep learning models, in causal statistical models and in human-machine teaming and AI ethics.

ROLE PURPOSE

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Research Associate to conduct internationally leading research in machine learning, with applications to intelligence analysis. This role will involve investigating and developing methods that will allow deep learning models to identify subsets of data with the highest potential for reducing uncertainty of model outputs, leveraging and building on existing methods in ML explainability, interpretability, and uncertainty quantification. The research will focus predominantly on vision, language and multimodal models, and on integration of these models with cutting-edge graph-based statistical methods that have been previously developed by members of the project team to support national security use.

This role will be part of the Defence and National Security (D&NS) Grand Challenge and will report directly to the PI for the AiTASHA project. Within the Turing, this role will sit primarily within the Defence Artificial Intelligence Research (DARe) centre, which encompasses diverse AI research spanning future sensing, space systems, human-machine teaming, synthetic environments, and edge AI, but there will also be opportunities to engage with researchers from across the D&NS Grand Challenge, including from policy and engineering teams.

The successful candidate will also join a vibrant and interdisciplinary team of researchers in the AiTASHA consortium and will have frequent opportunities to engage with internal stakeholders and external government partners throughout the delivery of the project. During the project it is expected that they will work as part of a small tight-knit cohort of Early Career Researchers spanning the AiTASHA consortium Universities.

DUTIES AND AREAS OF RESPONSIBILITY

• Play a leading role in undertaking high-quality research, actively contributing to, and steering the broader research aims of the Defence and National Security Grand Challenge.
• Provide technical leadership for research projects, ensuring successful outcomes, including that research outcomes meet our government partners’ requirements and can be deployed in the real world.
• Contribute to, and lead where required, interdisciplinary research teams spanning multiple partner organisations.
• Contribute to software development including planning, execution and package release and management.
• Be a point of contact, supporting the PI in engaging with stakeholders regarding projects and deputising for the PI in meetings where necessary.
• Take the lead on writing up findings as they emerge, producing and developing reports and publications in peer- reviewed journals, in collaboration with the research team.
• Present, disseminate and explain our work at meetings/events and contribute to both the internal and external visibility of the Institute.
• Take responsibility for driving collaboration with academic experts and broader research partners from across the Turing, and the wider Turing/project community.
• Supervise the work of early-career researchers in the team and provide guidance as required with line management of direct reports if required.

Requirements

• A PhD (or equivalent commensurate professional experience and/or qualifications) in a field with significant use of both computer programming and advanced statistical or numerical methods, e.g., machine learning, AI, computer science, mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering.
• Practical experience developing and applying Machine Learning to real world problems OR strong theoretical knowledge and academic experience with Machine Learning and adjacent topics.
• Significant experience in developing and applying computer vision and/or large language models, OR significant experience in machine learning interpretability, explainability, and/or uncertainty quantification.
• Experience developing software in a scientific computing context, ideally using Python/Pytorch, including the use of established libraries used in data science and artificial intelligence research.
• An understanding of the importance of good practices for producing reliable software and reproducible analyses, such as version control, issue tracking, automated testing, package management and literate analysis tools such as Jupyter.
• Experience conducting and publishing research to the standard required by top-tier peer-reviewed journals/conferences.
• Experience in scoping and investigating independent research questions within a given overarching theme and leading subsequent research projects to conclusion.
• Ability to mentor and evaluate the work of others (formal line management experience is not essential, but such applicants should be able to show significant evidence of informal mentorship).
• Must be eligible for SC clearance and be willing to undergo the clearance process once in post, if not already held.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE

If you are interested in this opportunity, please click the apply button below. You will need to register on the applicant portal and complete the application form including your CV (maximum 3 pages, no photo) and covering letter (maximum 2 pages) telling us:

• Your past experience innovating with code and/or data to solve real-world challenging problems.
• Why you would like to become part of the Turing’s Defence and Security Programme.
• How your skillset would complement the activities of the AiTASHA project.

Please note, if these details are not provided, we will be unable to progress with your application.

For questions about the role and the recruiting process please get in touch with us at recruitment@turing.ac.uk.

CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS: Sunday 11th January 2026 at 23:59 (London UK, GMT)

Interviews will take place in late January after the shortlisting process has been completed.

The successful candidate will need to be in post by or close to April 2026

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

This full-time post is offered on a fixed term basis for 2 years from the start date. The annual salary is £56,840 - £58,482. We also offer excellent benefits, including flexible working and family friendly policies, Employee-only benefits guide | The Alan Turing Institute

The Alan Turing Institute is based at the British Library, in the heart of London’s Knowledge Quarter. We expect staff to come to our office at least 4 days per month. Some roles may require more days in the office; the hiring manager will be able to confirm this during the interview.