This 12-month fixed-term post sits in the Research Operations Division of the UK Dementia Research Institute as a founding member of its AI initiative. The work is building software and strategy that keeps an inspectable account of claims, evidence and disagreements for a focused Alzheimer's question. It is a technical leadership role working as a peer with a Lab Brains engineer, with hybrid working. Sponsorship is not offered, so applicants must already hold the right to work.
What the job involves
- Develop the strategy and build software that maps claims, evidence, disagreements, capabilities and routes to outcomes for an Alzheimer's question
- Build a representation of scientific questions, scoped claims, evidence, sources, methods and uncertainty, with exact source links and versions
- Build ingestion, extraction, reconciliation and update pipelines for an agreed scientific corpus, with interfaces for researchers to inspect and correct results
- Build views showing where findings agree, genuinely disagree or cannot yet be compared
- Develop a first Alzheimer's outcome map with scientists, covering routes, unresolved assumptions, missing capabilities and next decisions
- Connect the outcome map to reviewed institutional capabilities, datasets and developing research to make collaborations or bottlenecks specific
- Build decision dossiers and feedback tools that record options considered, decisions taken, what was tried and how new evidence changed the picture
- Choose data models, search and graph technologies suited to the task, compare existing tools and publish reusable work where licensing allows
- Lead evaluation against ordinary search and structured evidence review, measuring evidence quality, scope errors, review effort and corrections
- Work with scientists and methodologists to make disagreement explicit and keep the shared account cheaper to maintain than to rebuild
- Keep laboratory owners in control of what is shared and make claims reproducible, with limitations and changes visible
- Influence how senior management adopts AI across the Institute
What’s required
Experience
- Evidence of delivering useful software
- Experience modelling and integrating complex information, such as scientific data systems, search, evidence synthesis, collaborative knowledge tools or research software
- Practical experience applying and evaluating language models or information extraction and retrieval methods, with an account of their failure modes
Skills & knowledge
- Strong programming ability, with the ability to learn the languages and tools a codebase needs
- Sound engineering practice: Git with GitHub or equivalent, code review, tests, continuous integration, documentation, packaging, dependency management and maintainable releases
- Careful reasoning about evidence, ambiguity, provenance and changing interpretations, turned into usable software
- Curiosity about how scientific communities establish knowledge and coordinate work, with a commitment to reproducibility, open collaboration and constructive disagreement
- Enthusiasm and ability to influence organisational change through technology adoption
Other
- Ability to work autonomously and lead: set priorities, make and justify decisions, bring others along and take ownership of outcomes
Nice to have
- Experience with knowledge graphs, ontologies or discourse graphs
- Evidence synthesis experience
- Interface design experience
- Biomedical research experience
- Open-source scientific software experience
What’s offered
- 27 days annual leave plus bank holidays, and up to 6 business closure days
- Private single medical insurance and an employee assistance programme
- Group life assurance up to 4x base salary, plus income protection and critical illness cover
- Enhanced maternity, paternity, neonatal and adoption pay
- Interest-free season ticket loan
- Pension with 6.1% employee contribution and 15.9% employer contribution
- Voluntary benefits programme with discounts and perks
- Hybrid working with up to 1-2 days remote per week
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Contact Details:
The Methodist Church in Britain Recruitment Team
