Researcher — Digital & AI-Native Governance

I I; Greater London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Salary option or fellowship

Remote-friendly

Job summary

Intelligent Institutions in London or fully remote is seeking a Researcher — Digital & AI-Native Governance to join our growing program.

You will conduct institutional analysis, formalize protocols with engineering, and develop frameworks for AI-mediated governance. This role includes equity plus a salary or a 12‑month fellowship, with scope for academic affiliation.

Qualifications

• You hold (or are pursuing) a PhD or equivalent depth in one or more relevant fields.
• You can write with precision and clarity for multiple audiences.
• You are comfortable with formal representations of institutional rules or eager to learn.
• You thrive in a startup where research informs product and vice versa.

Responsibilities

• Conduct institutional analysis and identify AI-mediated risk and accountability gaps.
• Translate institutional processes into formal protocols with the engineering team.
• Develop frameworks on governance alignment for AI-assisted systems.
• Compare governance across cooperatives, municipalities, and national systems.
• Contribute to field-building through writing and publishing.

Skills

Python

Data analysis

Knowledge graphs

NLP

Academic writing

Education

PhD or equivalent in relevant field

Job description

Researcher — Digital & AI-Native Governance

Intelligent Institutions · London / Remote · Equity + Salary or Fellowship

The Research Program

Intelligent Institutions builds practical infrastructure, but the intellectual foundation is a research program. Our core thesis is that bureaucracy is a contingent institutional form — produced by specific historical primitives (implicit rules, human-only processing, centralized trust) — and that new primitives (AI-assisted encoding, scalable execution, independent verification) make fundamentally different institutional architectures possible. This is not AI governance in the compliance sense. This is the study of how institutions themselves can be redesigned when AI becomes a governance primitive. The long-term ambition is a machine-readable corpus of governance protocols: the conditions for institutional design to become an empirical science.

What You'll Work On

• Institutional analysis — Studying how existing institutions encode authority, allocate discretion, handle exceptions, and produce accountability — and identifying where these structures break down under AI-mediated execution.
• Protocol formalization — Working with our engineering team to translate real institutional processes into formally specified protocols. Identifying patterns, failure modes, and compositional structures across jurisdictions and institutional types.
• Framework development — Advancing the analytical foundations — the structural mismatch between inherited institutions and networked, AI-mediated systems. Drawing on cybernetics, institutional economics, political theory, and design.
• Comparative research — Studying governance across institutional types and scales — cooperatives, municipalities, national systems — to build the empirical base for understanding what generalizes and what doesn't.
• Publishing and field-building — Writing for both academic and practitioner audiences. Establishing the intellectual foundations of a field that is still being defined.

Who You Are

• You hold (or are pursuing) a PhD or equivalent research depth in one or more of: institutional economics, political science, public administration, STS, computational social science, legal informatics, cybernetics, or a related field.
• You can write with precision and clarity for multiple audiences.
• You are comfortable with formal or structured representations of institutional rules — or eager to learn.
• You are comfortable in a startup environment where research informs product and product informs research.

Bonus

• Field research experience — especially in governance contexts in the Global South.
• Familiarity with AI safety, alignment, or responsible AI discourse (as a lens, not a destination).
• Computational skills: Python, data analysis, knowledge graphs, or NLP.
• Spanish, Portuguese, or French language ability.
• Prior involvement with GovAI, the Oxford Internet Institute, Code for America, UNDP Digital, or equivalent institutions.

Compensation & Structure

This role can be structured as a full‑time research position (equity + salary) or as a research fellowship (12‑month term with renewal). We are open to affiliations with academic institutions.

How to Apply

Send a writing sample and a short note explaining what you think is most underexplored about institutional design in the agentic era.