Postdoc: Clinical NLP & Open-Weight LLMs Lead

University of Liverpool; Liverpool; On-site; GBP 40,000 - 46,000; Full time

Job summary

The University of Liverpool invites applications for a full-time post responsible for day-to-day technical ownership of AIM-SAFE Work Package 5, Task 5.1, including benchmarking and selecting open-weight Small Language Models for clinical NLP tasks such as entity recognition and drug-interaction reasoning.

You will design parameter-efficient fine-tuning pipelines (LoRA, QLoRA, adapters) within a reproducible MLOps framework and apply quantisation for CPU NHS deployment; you will integrate

Responsibilities

• Benchmarking and selecting open-weight Small Language Models for clinical NLP tasks such as entity recognition and drug-interaction reasoning
• Designing parameter-efficient fine-tuning pipelines (LoRA, QLoRA, adapters) within a reproducible MLOps framework
• Applying quantisation (GPTQ, AWQ, GGUF/llama.cpp) for CPU-feasible NHS deployment
• Integrating federated and privacy-preserving learning via the CAFEIN platform at CERN
• Embedding the RUC2 clinical safety governance layer
• Leading Deliverable D5.1
• Acting as technical liaison with KAIST-led orchestration team and Knowledgator-led RAG team
• Publishing in high-impact venues and mentoring junior researchers within Intelligent Systems Research Group, EECS

Job description

The University of Liverpool invites applications for a full-time post responsible for day-to-day technical ownership of AIM-SAFE Work Package 5, Task 5.1, including benchmarking and selecting open-weight Small Language Models for clinical NLP tasks such as entity recognition and drug-interaction reasoning.

You will design parameter-efficient fine-tuning pipelines (LoRA, QLoRA, adapters) within a reproducible MLOps framework and apply quantisation for CPU NHS deployment; you will integrate