Researcher; AI and quantitative Kings Cross Research and Development

Salary: £39,071 per annum depending on experience, plus benefits

Grade: 6 (May be able to offer a senior role (Grade
5) depending on experience)

Contract:

12-month Fixed Term Contract with possibility of extension, renewal or switch to permanent.

Closing Date:
Friday 9 October 2026

Drawing from multiple disciplines, ODI research creates knowledge, methods, and approaches to build open and trustworthy data ecosystems. Research projects at the ODI range from theoretical to applied, involve a range of sectors and stakeholders, are mindful of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations, and deliver tangible impact.

This role has a strong focus on artificial intelligence, specifically advancing data-centric AI methodologies, benchmark creation and model evaluation, and improving the AI readiness of existing and emerging data infrastructures. Research outputs support the communication of insights, best practices, and recommendations as part of our policy and advisory work, and inform new tools, courses, and services.

Research at the ODI follows established and emerging research methods from computer science, data science, economics, and social and political sciences and is aligned with our research integrity practices. As a member of the team you will contribute to this community of practice.

Typical research outputs the role would lead on and contribute to include, depending on the type of project: technical reports, landscape reviews, blog posts, literature reviews, academic articles, slide decks, visualisations, datasets, code.

Conduct and manage research activities within projects on a variety of topics in tight time frames, specifically:

• Execution of rigorous experiments to evaluate model performance according to a diverse range of technical metrics.
• Lead and own work packages covering corpus construction, ground-truth curation, task design, evaluation harnesses, and statistical analysis, and benchmarking reproducibility
• Contribute to stakeholder engagement to ensure benchmarks and evaluations reflect the needs and expectations of stakeholders
• Assess public sector and government datasets and use cases for AI-readiness using established ODI frameworks.
• Author of peer-reviewed technical papers, conference submissions,technical annexes, and reproducible code repositories alongside blog posts and policy briefings.
• Design and conduct desk reviews, systematic literature reviews, stakeholder mapping, surveys and interviews on areas related to data, AI and technology, drawing on wider theoretical frameworks.
• Coordinate with external partners, collaborators and clients in scoping and delivering work.
• Support business development and fundraising activities by contributing to research design, methodology drafting and proposal development.
• Communicate research findings to a wide range of audiences through high quality written reports, blog posts, peer-reviewed publications, presentations and workshops to ensure they have high impact.
• Work with the wider ODI team to define and shape the ODI’s research agenda, topics and policy positions.
• Support others in the ODI to strengthen their skills and knowledge in research.

• Reflecting and developing ODI's values and culture in the way you work.
• Taking time for continuous professional development, coaching and mentoring, both individually and as a team.

As an ODI researcher, you are expected to meet the following level of competency:

• Proficiency in research scoping and planning, choosing and justification of research methods, and research synthesis and communication.
• Proficiency in execution of qualitative, quantitative and mixed research.
• An…