Research Assistant in AI Compliance and Adversarial Auditing

1000scholars; Stafford; Hybrid; GBP 36,000 - 37,000; Part time

Job summary

Keele University, School of Computer Science and Mathematics, invites applications for a part-time (0.5FTE) fixed-term role until 31 August 2027. Agile working with a blend of home and office-based work and potential for job share.

You will contribute to developing an open multimodal AI compliance and adversarial auditing benchmark, build LLM evaluation pipelines, and support reproducible experiments across text, audio, and vision-language data.

Qualifications

• Master's degree in AI/ML/DS/CS/Cyber Security or closely related area.
• Strong programming skills in Python and practical ML/LLM experience.
• Desirable: PyTorch, Hugging Face, multimodal AI, LLM evaluation, cybersecurity, Git.

Responsibilities

• Develop and run multimodal AI benchmark tasks across text, structured/telemetry, audio and vision-language data.
• Build and evaluate LLM evaluation pipelines; implement adversarial and robustness testing.
• Process multimodal datasets; evaluate open-weight LLMs with reproducible experiments.
• Contribute to the shared evaluation framework, documentation, open-source code, and project reports.

Skills

Python

Machine Learning

LLMs

Git/GitHub

Education

Master's degree in AI/ML/DS/CS/Cyber Security

Tools

GitHub

PyTorch

Hugging Face

Reproducible pipelines

Job description

Part time (0.5FTE) & fixed term until 31/8/2027

Agile working (blend of home and office based) / Arrangements for job share would be considered

The opportunity

We are looking for a motivated team member to join a team of staff in Keele University/ The School of Computer Science and Mathematics.

The successful candidate will contribute to the development of an open multimodal AI compliance and adversarial auditing benchmark for evaluating AI systems in regulated sectors. The role will involve supporting the design, implementation and evaluation of benchmark tasks across text, structured/telemetry, audio and vision-language data.

The post holder will develop and run Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation pipelines, implement adversarial and robustness testing, prepare and process multimodal datasets, and evaluate open-weight LLMs using reproducible experiments. They will contribute to the shared evaluation framework, including robustness metrics, attack and perturbation testing, cross-modal evaluation and baseline model experiments. The candidate will also support the development of the project’s compliance assessment component and contribute to documentation, open-source code, research outputs and the public release of the benchmark. The role will involve working closely with the academic team and the project’s industry partner.

You will have a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, Computer Science, Cyber Security or a closely related area. You should have strong programming skills, particularly in Python, and practical experience with machine learning and/or LLMs/agentic AI. Experience with PyTorch, Hugging Face, multimodal AI, adversarial machine learning, LLM evaluation, LLM agents, cybersecurity, Git/GitHub or reproducible experimental pipelines would be desirable.

Please note that the starting salary will typically be at the bottom of the pay scale shown above.

The University is committed to operating flexible working practices wherever possible.

The University

Keele University is renowned for its exciting approach to higher education, innovative research, beautiful campus, strong community spirit and excellent student experience. With a turnover in excess of £170 million, over 15,000 students and a total staff of approximately 2000, the University provides high-quality teaching across a wide range of academic and vocational subjects and promotes world-class research. Further information can be found at www.keele.ac.uk/about

Keele University is committed to the principles of the Athena Swan charter, and values equity and diversity across our workforce. We strive to ensure that our workforce is representative of broader society, and therefore, we would actively welcome applications from women/men for this role.

Keele University values equity and diversity across our workforce and to ensuring our staff community is reflective of the diversity of our student population. In support of these commitments the University welcomes applications from individuals of Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds for all roles.

Closing date: 18th October 2026

Interviews will be held on: 3rd November 2026

£36,320 to £37,369 (Incremental Progression) Grade 6a