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

EURAXESS Ireland; Karlskrona kommun; On-site; SEK 299,235 - 387,897; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits package

Individual study plan development

Up to 20% teaching opportunities

Job summary

EURAXESS Ireland offers a PhD position at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona. The research focuses on how AI agents transform requirements engineering and aims to investigate adversarial vulnerabilities and compliance implications in this field.

The candidate will work within a prominent research environment, striving to redefine requirements practices against emerging challenges. Applicants should possess a relevant master's degree and have grounding in software development and AI.

Qualifications

• Candidate must have a background in software engineering, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.
• Experience in professional software development is required.
• Interest in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning development.

Responsibilities

• Investigate adversarial vulnerabilities in requirements engineering.
• Develop threat models for continuous requirements engineering.
• Design robust architectures for requirements engineering.
• Analyze compliance implications of evolving requirements.

Skills

Software engineering

Requirements engineering

Artificial Intelligence

Cybersecurity

Communication in English

Education

Master or Master of Science degree in software engineering, data science, AI, or computer science

Job description

Organisation/Company Blekinge Institute of Technology Department Department of Software Engineering Research Field Computer science » Other Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Positions PhD Positions Application Deadline 15 Aug 2026 - 23:59 (Europe/Stockholm) Country Sweden Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 40 Offer Starting Date 1 Oct 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Offer Description

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.

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.

Additional Information

As an employee at BTH, you are offered a comprehensive benefits package that promotes quality of life, health, and security both at work and in your private life. You can read more about our specific benefits on our website: Benefits for employees | Blekinge Tekniska Högskola

Eligibility Criteria

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.