Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M Postdoctoral Researcher – Source Code History Analysis

Inria, the French national research institute for the digital sciences; France; Hybride; EUR 50 000 - 62 000; Plein temps

Avantages offerts par ce poste

Partial transport reimbursement

7 weeks annual leave

6 months teleworking eligibility

Professional equipment provided

Open-source dissemination

Résumé du poste

Inria seeks a researcher to advance code analysis across large software histories. You will work on HyperAST-based DAG models, TSQ language formalization, and scalable incremental analyses within the Spirals project, focusing on self-adaptive systems.

You will contribute to supervision, seminars, and open-source efforts, collaborating with CRIStAL/Inria teams in France. A strong publication record is expected.

Qualifications

• Experience researching large real-world codebases and performance benchmarking.
• Strong background in software analysis and code history modeling.
• Ability to mentor students and collaborate across teams.

Responsabilités

• Formalize TSQ language beyond syntax-highlighting for code analysis.
• Build incremental code search engine atop TSQ and HyperAST.
• Develop def-use/incremental analysis for large repos.
• Extend code search to Software Heritage archive integration.
• Disseminate findings via publications and open-source releases.

Connaissances

Software engineering

Mining software repos

Graph theory

Program analysis

Incremental analysis

Distributed systems

Code search

Formation

PhD in Computer Science

Outils

TSQ

HyperAST

Git internals

SWH integration

Description du poste

Inria, the French national research institute for the digital sciences

Organisation/Company Inria, the French national research institute for the digital sciences Research Field Computer science Researcher Profile Recognised Researcher (R2) Application Deadline 22 Oct 2026 - 00:00 (UTC) Country France Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 38.5 Offer Starting Date 1 Oct 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Reference Number 2026-10511 Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Offer Description

The SPIRALS project team conducts research in distributed systems and software science. Our goal is to introduce greater autonomy into software systems' adaptation mechanisms, specifically to support the transition from adaptive to self-adaptive systems. We focus particularly on two properties: self-healing and self-optimization. With self-healing, we aim to study and adapt data mining and machine learning solutions to the design and implementation of software systems, especially for the automatic repair of software systems. With self-optimization, we aim to share, collect, and analyze behaviors in a distributed environment to continuously adapt, optimize, and maintain software systems, moving toward perpetual distributed systems. The Spirals project team works in cloud computing and mobile application development.

Analyzing the history of source code is becoming essential to keep pace with increasingly large and complex software systems — some projects, like Chromium or the Linux kernel, span tens of millions of lines of code and over a million commits. Most existing tools still treat code at the level of individual text files, which limits their ability to scale when changes span many files (e.g., automated refactorings, dependency updates) or when several versions of a codebase must be analyzed together.

This position is part of a research project built around HyperAST, a model that represents source code histories as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and deduplicates code subtrees within and across versions. This structure makes it possible to pre-compute and reuse intermediate analysis results efficiently, enabling accurate, temporally consistent analyses at a scale current approaches cannot reach.

• Formalize the TSQ (Tree-sitter Query) language beyond its original syntax-highlighting purpose, turning it into a robust, well-specified intermediate representation for code analysis
• Design and build an incremental code search engine for large repositories on top of TSQ and HyperAST
• Develop incremental use-def / def-use relation computation for large repositories, including a memory-efficient model for persisting partial scope graphs on local syntax subtrees
• Extend incremental code search to the Software Heritage (SWH) archive, adapting the query system into an indexing/search service and integrating HyperAST as an SWH data provider
• Bring def-use / use-def computation to the SWH archive, precomputing unresolved references and persisting the scope-graph elements most relevant to name resolution
• Apply the resulting code search and name resolution infrastructure to concrete problems: multi-repository root-cause analysis, code smell/dependency co-evolution studies, detection of intentional code tampering, and policy mining
• Contribute to supervision (co-supervising master's/PhD students), team activities (seminars, journal clubs), dissemination (publications, open-source releases, conference talks such as FOSDEM), and open-science practices (HAL, Software Heritage, Zenodo, artifact submissions)
• Solid background in software engineering / mining software repositories, ideally with prior experience on Git internals, DAG-based data structures, or incremental analysis techniques
• Experience designing and maintaining tools for repository analysis at scale
• Familiarity with version control systems and how they represent history (Git, and ideally awareness of alternatives such as Piper, Sapling, Mercurial)
• Knowledge of program analysis concepts: name resolution, scope graphs, refactoring detection, syntactic/semantic code differencing
• Programming and systems skills sufficient for building query/search infrastructure and integrating with large archives (e.g., Software Heritage)
• Demonstrated record of independent research and publication; some supervision or mentoring experience is a plus

Languages FRENCH Level Basic

Languages ENGLISH Level Good

Specific Requirements

• Ability to work with very large, real-world codebases and evaluate approaches through rigorous performance benchmarking and scalability testing
• Comfort moving between theoretical foundations (graph theory, language theory, database theory) and practical systems engineering
• Capacity to work both independently and collaboratively across disciplines (software engineering, green IT, database systems) and across teams within CRIStAL/Inria
• Strong communication and dissemination habits: publishing, open-sourcing tools, and engaging with the open-science and software preservation community (Software Heritage ecosystem in particular)
• Interest in mentoring and progressively taking on leadership responsibilities (student supervision, grant writing, team building) as part of career development toward an independent academic position

Additional Information

• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking (after 6 months of employment) and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities