Postdoctoral Research Associate in London

This is a three-year full-time position funded by the EPSRC project INDIMO: Invariant Discovery and Monitoring for Message-Passing Programs, starting around March 2026 (flexible start date). The successful candidate will join the Systems & Software Security Lab (S3Lab) at Royal Holloway, a dynamic research group comprising 3 academics, 7 PhD students, and 1 postdoc, working on cutting-edge problems in software verification and security.

Software systems that rely on message-passing concurrency are increasingly popular thanks to programming languages such as Go, Rust, Erlang, and Kotlin which support it natively. These languages notably power WhatsApp's servers, Uber's software infrastructure, and the NHS information backbone. Two key advantages of message-passing concurrency are that it is higher-level and avoids data-race bugs by construction. However, just like mutex-based concurrency, message-passing concurrency is liable to bugs such as deadlocks—which can cause huge performance problems and correctness issues.

This project aims at designing new techniques and tools to detect such bugs automatically, with a particular focus on programs that include statically unknown parameters that affect their concurrent structure, e.g., communication channel bounds, number of concurrent processes. We will adopt a hybrid approach to software verification that will give us the best of both worlds: the high coverage of static approaches and the high precision of dynamic approaches.

The successful candidate will:

• Have a PhD in Computer Science (or be near completion) with a strong research record in one or more of the following areas: software verification, programming languages, static analysis, runtime monitoring, or software engineering.
• Demonstrate research capability through publications in top-tier venues and possess excellent programming skills.
• Experience with message-passing concurrent languages such as Go, Erlang, or Rust would be an advantage.

The role offers an excellent opportunity to work on fundamental research problems with real-world impact, collaborate with leading industry partners (Uber and WhatsApp) and other universities (this project is shared with the University of Kent and the University of Aarhus is a partner), and contribute to open-source tools that will benefit the wider software development community. You will be expected to conduct independent research, publish in leading academic venues, collaborate with PhD students, and contribute to the overall goals of the INDIMO project.

In return we offer a highly competitive rewards and benefits package including:

• Generous annual leave entitlement
• Training and Development opportunities
• Pension Scheme with generous employer contribution
• Various schemes including Cycle to Work, Season Ticket Loans and help with the cost of Eyesight testing
• Free parking

The post is based in Egham, Surrey where the University is situated in a beautiful, leafy campus near to Windsor Great Park and within commuting distance from London. This is a fixed term post for three years from March 2026 (flexible start date).

For an informal discussion about the post, please contact Dr Julien Lange. For queries on the application process the Human Resources Department can be contacted by email. Please quote the reference. Closing Date: 23:59, 19 February 2026. Interview Date: To be confirmed.

The university has adopted hybrid working for some roles therefore some remote working may be possible for this role. Royal Holloway is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI), and encourages applications from all people regardless of age, disability, gender, marital status, parental status, race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, or trans status or history. More information on our structures and initiatives around EDI, including information on staff diversity networks, can be found on our Equality and Diversity Intranet page.