Research Associate(UK Visa Sponsorship)

Automotive Jobs, Health and Care
Uk
February 20, 2026
Full Time Permanent
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Job Description

Join a Community Shaping the Future of AI

The University of Edinburgh is internationally recognised for research excellence and academic impact. Within its School of Informatics — one of Europe’s leading AI research hubs — we are recruiting a Postdoctoral Research Associate to contribute to a major project focused on benchmarking and optimising next-generation foundation models.

This is more than a research post. It is an opportunity to help define how AI systems are evaluated for cost, efficiency, environmental sustainability, and performance across modern hardware.

The Research Project

  • This role is funded through a £2M programme supported by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), under the “Scaling Compute: AI at 1/1000th the Cost” initiative.
  • The project aims to design advanced benchmarks capable of assessing:
  • Sparse and efficient LLM/VLM architectures
  • Agentic and reasoning-driven models
  • Trade-offs between performance, cost, and energy use
  • Deployment across diverse hardware systems
  • The successful candidate will collaborate with researchers across Edinburgh and leading UK computational centres, including EPCC.

What You Will Do

  • Conduct original research into efficient large language and vision-language models
  • Develop and implement benchmarking frameworks
  • Evaluate performance metrics across varied hardware environments
  • Contribute to academic publications and preprints
  • Present findings at international conferences (travel funding provided)
  • Work collaboratively within a multi-institution research team
  • Access to high-performance computing infrastructure is provided to support this work.

About You

We are looking for a motivated researcher with:

  • A PhD (or near completion) in NLP, Machine Learning, ML Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related fields
  • Evidence of research excellence (publications, preprints, or strong technical portfolio)
  • Practical experience implementing and training foundation models (LLMs/VLMs)
  • Familiarity with hardware-aware AI optimisation and performance tracking
  • Ability to collaborate effectively within large interdisciplinary teams
  • Selection will be based on overall research strength and alignment with the project’s goals.

Working Environment & Flexibility

The role is full-time (35 hours/week), though hybrid arrangements may be considered informally to support work-life balance.

You will be joining a diverse international research community committed to inclusive excellence. The University actively supports equality initiatives and maintains recognised accreditation in gender and diversity advancement.

Benefits & Professional Support

As part of the University community, you can expect:

  • Competitive salary within Grade UE07
  • Generous annual leave entitlement
  • Defined benefits pension scheme
  • Staff discounts and wellbeing initiatives

Flexible working options

  • Professional development opportunities
  • Access to world-class research infrastructure
  • International applicants may be eligible for visa sponsorship, subject to individual circumstances.

Application Process

Please submit:

Useful UK Government Resources for Applicants

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