Postdoctoral Research Associate

UAG; Liverpool; Hybrid; GBP 40,000 - 46,000; Full time

Job summary

The University of Liverpool is seeking a researcher to take day-to-day technical ownership of Work Package 5, Task 5.1 for AIM-SAFE, a Horizon Europe project. You will benchmark and select open-weight Small Language Models for clinical NLP tasks such as entity recognition and drug-interaction reasoning, and design parameter-efficient fine-tuning pipelines within a reproducible MLOps framework.

You will apply quantisation for CPU-feasible NHS deployment, integrate federated learning via the

Job description

Hours of work: Full-time

Tenure: The post is available up to 31 May 2030

AIM-SAFE is a Horizon Europe project building a multi-agent clinical reasoning framework from open-weight, locally deployable AI, in partnership with KAIST, Knowledgator, the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and CERN.

The University of Liverpool leads Work Package 5, Task 5.1, and this post takes day-to-day technical ownership of it: 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; and leading Deliverable D5.1.

You will also act as the technical liaison with the KAIST-led multi-agent orchestration team and the Knowledgator-led RAG team, publish in high-impact venues, and mentor junior researchers within the Intelligent Systems Research Group, School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics & Computer Science.

If you are still awaiting your PhD to be awarded you will be appointed at Grade 6, spine point 30. Upon written confirmation that you have been awarded your PhD, your salary will be increased to Grade 7, spine point 31.

Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

We are committed to enhancing a workforce as diverse as our community and particularly encourage applicants who are of minoritised genders and ethnic backgrounds, living with a disability, and/or are members of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Closing Date: 12 November 2026 23:30

£39,906 to £46,049 per annum