AI & Data-Centric Researcher — Benchmarking

Open Data Institute; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 35,000 - 43,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

5% contributory pension

Life assurance

Long-term disability cover

Critical illness cover

Coaching and mentoring for skills

Job summary

The Open Data Institute seeks an experienced researcher to lead AI/data-centric projects within a fast-paced, multi-disciplinary team. You will design experiments, manage data pipelines, and contribute to policy-oriented outputs across technical and public-facing channels.

You will collaborate with external partners, publish results, and support ODI's broader research agenda while mentoring colleagues and advancing data ethics and open science practices.

Qualifications

• Proficiency in scoping and planning research projects, selecting appropriate methods.
• Ability to conduct qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research.
• Understanding of research impact, integrity and open science principles.
• Experience applying rigorous evaluation methods for qualitative and quantitative research.
• Awareness of privacy and GDPR implications in research practice.

Responsibilities

• Execute rigorous experiments to evaluate model performance across metrics.
• Lead work packages: corpus construction, ground-truth curation, design of tasks and benchmarks.
• Engage stakeholders to align benchmarks with needs and expectations.
• Assess AI-readiness of public sector datasets using ODI frameworks.
• Author technical papers, blog posts, and reproducible code alongside policy briefings.

Skills

Research methods

Quantitative analysis

Qualitative research

Data privacy

Open science

Agile

Stakeholder engagement

Job description

The Open Data Institute seeks an experienced researcher to lead AI/data-centric projects within a fast-paced, multi-disciplinary team. You will design experiments, manage data pipelines, and contribute to policy-oriented outputs across technical and public-facing channels.

You will collaborate with external partners, publish results, and support ODI's broader research agenda while mentoring colleagues and advancing data ethics and open science practices.