About this role
Right to work: Please note that it will not be possible for the University to issue a Certificate of Sponsorship to the successful candidate for this position. Therefore, the appointable candidate will need to be eligible to work in the UK or have leave to remain in the UK and associated right to work for the duration of their employment with the University, in accordance with the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006.
Applications are invited for the post of Post Doctoral Research Associate (PDRA) in the Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway.
This is a three-year full-time position funded by the EPSRC project INDIMO: Invariant Discovery and Monitoring for Message-Passing Programs, starting around March 2026 (flexible start date). The successful candidate will join the Systems & Software Security Lab (S3Lab) at Royal Holloway, a dynamic research group comprising 3 academics, 7 PhD students, and 1 postdoc, working on cutting-edge problems in software verification and security.
Software systems that rely on message-passing concurrency are increasingly popular thanks to programming languages such as Go, Rust, Erlang, and Kotlin which support it natively. These languages notably power WhatsApp's servers, Uber's software infrastructure, and the NHS information backbone.
Two key advantages of message-passing concurrency are that it is higher-level and avoids data-race bugs by construction. However, just like mutex-based concurrency, message-passing concurrency is liable to bugs such as deadlocks—which can cause huge performance problems and correctness issues.
This project aims at designing new techniques and tools to detect such bugs automatically, with a particular focus on programs that include statically unknown parameters that affect their concurrent structure, e.g., communication channel bounds, number of concurrent processes. We will adopt a hybrid approach to software verification that will give us the best of both worlds: the high coverage of static approaches and the high precision of dynamic approaches.
The successful candidate will:
You will have a PhD in Computer Science (or be near completion) with a strong research record in one or more of the following areas: software verification, programming languages, static analysis, runtime monitoring, or software engineering. You will have demonstrated research capability through publications in top-tier venues and possess excellent programming skills. Experience with message-passing concurrent languages such as Go, Erlang, or Rust would be an advantage.
The role offers an excellent opportunity to work on fundamental research problems with real-world impact, collaborate with leading industry partners (Uber and WhatsApp) and other universities (this project is shared with the University of Kent and the University of Aarhus is a partner), and contribute to open-source tools that will benefit the wider software development community. You will be expected to conduct independent research, publish in leading academic venues, collaborate with PhD students, and contribute to the overall goals of the INDIMO project.
In return we offer a highly competitive rewards and benefits package including:
Generous annual leave entitlement Training and Development opportunities Pension Scheme with generous employer contribution Various schemes including Cycle to Work, Season Ticket Loans and help with the cost of Eyesight testing. Free parking
The University is situated in a beautiful, leafy campus near to Windsor Great Park and within commuting distance from London.
For an informal discussion about the post, please contact Dr Julien Lange
For queries on the application process the Human Resources Department can be contacted by email.