Researcher — Digital & AI-Native Governance

Researcher — Digital & AI-Native Governance

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

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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