Ph.D. student position in Requirements Engineering, AI and Security

Hertz First Rent A Car; Karlskrona kommun; On-site; SEK 323,640 - 390,600; Full time

Job summary

Hertz First Rent A Car is offering a Ph.D. student position in Requirements Engineering, AI, and Security, based in Karlskrona, Sweden. The role focuses on exploring how AI impacts requirements elicitation and the adaptation of AI systems.

Ideal candidates should possess a relevant Master's degree and experience in software development and AI. Rules for PhD students in Sweden apply, with additional benefits including teaching opportunities.

Qualifications

• Eligible for postgraduate education with a relevant degree or knowledge.
• Documented experience in professional software development.
• Interest in AI and Machine Learning development.

Responsibilities

• Investigate adversarial vulnerabilities in agentic RE pipelines.
• Develop a threat model for continuous requirements engineering.
• Design architecture for adversarially robust continuous RE.
• Analyze compliance implications under emerging regulatory frameworks.

Skills

Software engineering

Requirements engineering

Artificial intelligence

Cybersecurity

Machine Learning

Proficiency in English

Education

Master or Master of Science degree in Software Engineering, Data Science, AI, or Computer Science

Job description

Ph.D. student position in Requirements Engineering, AI and Security

Reference number BTH3 2026/64

Blekinge Institute of Technology is a place of curiosity and ingenuity with a campus in the middle of the Blekinge archipelago. Here we offer education from undergraduate to doctoral level and conduct world-class applied research. We change and make a difference. Do you want to become one of us?

The Department of Software Engineering consists of about 50 researchers and teachers from 20 countries. Our tradition in software engineering traces back to 1990 when we pioneered Sweden’s first academic education in the software engineering area in cooperation with Ericsson. The department’s research and education environment, SERL Sweden – the Software Engineering Research and Education Lab, has since then expanded into a world-leading research environment in empirical software engineering. The department is responsible for education programs in software engineering from Bachelor to Ph.D. levels.

As a doctoral student in this position, you are expected to explore how AI agents support and transform the requirements elicitation and evolution process (AI4RE) and how the continuous, runtime adaptation of AI-intensive systems challenges conventional requirements engineering practices (RE4AI). This work investigates how agentic pipelines (agents that support requirements elicitation, runtime drift detection and specification) introduce novel adversarial attack surfaces that conventional RE methods are not equipped to defend against, requiring new approaches for requirements provenance, stakeholder trust modeling, and continuous validation.

This project delves into the security and robustness of continuous requirements evolution, focusing on threat vectors such as data poisoning of runtime evidence streams, adversarial stakeholder manipulation across elicitation cycles, and prompt injection attacks targeting LLM-based RE agents. The research is also planned to examine how foundational requirements completeness, traceability, veribiability and human oversight should be redefined in the presence of probabilistic outputs, non-deterministic agent behavior, and continuous data dependencies, and how these factors impact the trustworthiness and compliance of evolved requirements artifacts.

The research will be carried out in collaboration with various industry partners. The key responsibilities include:

• Investigate how agentic RE pipelines introduce adversarial vulnerabilities across data, stakeholder, and agentic layers.
• Develop a threat model for continuous requirements engineering, including attack vectors and their effects across the full requirements evolution pipeline.
• Design an architecture for adversarially robust continuous RE, including provenance tracking, stakeholder trust mechanisms, prompt injection defenses, and human-in-the-loop verification gates.
• Analyze compliance implications of continuously evolving requirements under emerging regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act, with focus on high-risk AI systems in healthcare, critical infrastructure, and low-code platforms.

For this position, we are looking for a candidate with a background in software engineering, requirements engineering, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.

Rules and benefits for PhD students in Sweden apply to this position. The PhD student will develop an individual study plan in software engineering together with his or her supervisors. The position may include up to 20% of other services, e.g., teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Eligibility requirements

To be employed as a Ph.D. student, it is required that the applicant is or will be admitted to postgraduate education.

Eligible for admission to postgraduate education is a person who has completed a degree at an advanced level in a technical, mathematical, or scientific field or who has otherwise acquired knowledge to be able to benefit from postgraduate education in the subject.

Eligibility requirements have to be satisfied at the time of getting enrolled in the studies, not at the time of applying for the position.

Meriting competencies and experience

In addition to the requirements described in the work description and the eligibility requirements for the position, the following degrees, competencies, and experiences are considered a merit:

• Master or Master of Science degree in software engineering, data science, AI, or computer science.
• Documented experience in professional software development.
• Documented experience or interest in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning development.
• Proficiency in written and oral communication in English.

Place of employment: Karlskrona.

Commencement: Early Fall 2026, exact date to be negotiated.

Duration: Temporary employment for up to 4 years of full-time research. The position may contain up to 20% other services, e.g., teaching, whereby the employment period can be extended to a maximum of 5 years.

Your application should contain the following:

• A statement of your background, knowledge, and experience in the area(s) relevant to the position.
• A CV.
• Certified degree certificates and transcripts that are officially issued by your university; see universityadmissions.se for official recommendations.
• Contact information for two references (reference letters are not required at this point).
• The earliest date you can start to work.
• An appendix with current publications (if applicable).
• A link to your thesis (latest/highest degree).

Blekinge Institute of Technology, BTH, embraces diversity and welcomes applicants with varying backgrounds and experiences. We work actively to take advantage of the qualities that diversity and an even gender distribution contribute to our operations.