Research Engineer - Scientific And Field Building; Ftc)

Interviews:
There will be a two-stage process comprising of an online interview and an in-person interview.

In-person interview: 3rd December 2026

Closing date for applications: 15th November 2026

The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is a globally leading multidisciplinary research institute with a community of c. 1000 researchers investigating the spectrum of neurodegenerative disorders causing dementia, driving a step change in our understanding of neurodegeneration, and accelerating the discovery, development and delivery of interventions that will help diagnose, treat, and ultimately prevent dementia.

Research produces papers, datasets and promising ideas, but the connections between them are difficult to maintain. A finding may depend on an untested assumption. Two apparent contradictions may concern different experimental systems. Several labs may be blocked by the same missing capability. Important negative results and developing work may never become visible outside the team that produced them.

Help UK DRI understand what is known, where the evidence disagrees and what work could make the biggest difference next. You can learn more about our ambitions here.

You will develop the strategy and build software that makes these questions easier to investigate and act on. Starting with a focused Alzheimer’s disease research question, you will help scientists create and maintain an inspectable map of claims, evidence, disagreements, capabilities and possible routes towards a meaningful outcome. Over time, that work should connect published literature with selected, authorised unpublished research and the knowledge held across UK DRI laboratories.

We are looking for a technical leader who thinks big and cares about how science establishes knowledge and how institutions help people learn and work together. You might already be interested in discourse graphs, claims and evidence, outcome graphs, reproducibility, open science or new ways of organising research. You might have encountered the same problems while building search tools, scientific data systems or collaborative software.

We value the ability to turn that curiosity and ability to think big into useful working systems.

You will be a founding member of the UK DRI AI initiative, working as a peer with an engineer building Lab Brains and scientific workflows. Together, you will connect what laboratories learn and influence what the institute can understand and do.

• A practical representation of scientific questions, scoped claims, supporting and opposing evidence, sources, methods and uncertainty. Keep exact source links, versions and the distinction between proposed and reviewed interpretations.
• Ingestion, extraction, reconciliation and update pipelines for an agreed scientific corpus, with interfaces that make it easy for researchers to inspect, qualify and correct the results.
• Views that reveal where findings agree, genuinely disagree or cannot yet be compared, without treating missing evidence as evidence against a claim.
• A first Alzheimer outcome map: work with scientists to describe what must become possible for a selected outcome, the alternative routes, unresolved assumptions, missing capabilities and next decisions.
• Connections between that map and reviewed institutional capabilities, datasets and developing research, making potential collaborations or shared bottlenecks specific enough for people to evaluate.
• Decision dossiers and feedback tools that record what was considered, what an accountable owner chose, what was tried and how subsequent evidence changed the picture.
• Choose data models, search and graph technologies according to the task. Learn from communities such as Discourse Graphs and existing…