PhD in Causal RL for Industrial Automation (Remote)

Phaidra; Cambridge; On-site; GBP 21,000 - 26,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

MacBook

Unlimited PTO

Parental leave

Equity

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Phaidra invites applications for a fully funded 4‑year PhD studentship hosted at the University of Cambridge. You will explore integrating causal reasoning into reinforcement learning to build robust AI control systems for industrial settings.

The project covers theoretical foundations, algorithm development, and benchmarking, with supervision from Cambridge and Phaidra. International applicants welcome; January 2027 start.

Qualifications

• A first-class or upper second-class honours degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Statistics, or a related technical field.
• Strong background in at least one of: reinforcement learning, machine learning, probabilistic modelling, or control theory.
• Proficiency in Python and standard ML libraries (PyTorch, NumPy, SciPy, scikit‑learn).
• Clear scientific writing skills and the ability to communicate research to both academic and applied audiences.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to theoretical foundations of offline and online RL with a causal lens.
• Develop algorithms that leverage causal structure to improve generalisation and policy guarantees.
• Benchmark proposed methods in controlled simulated environments with known causal structure.

Skills

Python programming

Reinforcement learning

Machine learning

Probabilistic modelling

Scientific writing

Education

First-class or upper second-class honours degree in CS/Math/Engineering/Stats

Tools

PyTorch

NumPy

SciPy

scikit-learn

Job description

Phaidra invites applications for a fully funded 4‑year PhD studentship hosted at the University of Cambridge. You will explore integrating causal reasoning into reinforcement learning to build robust AI control systems for industrial settings.

The project covers theoretical foundations, algorithm development, and benchmarking, with supervision from Cambridge and Phaidra. International applicants welcome; January 2027 start.