Research Associate in Formal Modelling and Verification

Research Associate in Formal Modelling and Verification

Posting

Start Date:

27/08/2026 Job  School/Department:
Computer Science Work Arrangement:
Full Time (Hybrid) Contract Type:
Fixed-term Salary per annum (£): £38,784 - £39,906 Closing Date: 04/10/2026

The University of Sheffield is a remarkable place to work. Our people are at the heart of everything we do. Their diverse backgrounds, abilities and beliefs make Sheffield a world-class university.

We offer a fantastic range of benefits including a highly competitive annual leave entitlement (with the ability to purchase more), a generous pensions scheme, flexible working opportunities, a commitment to your development and wellbeing, a wide range of retail discounts, and much more. Find out more about our benefits (opens in a new window) and join us to become part of something special.

A Research Associate position is available on COVERT (“Safe and secure COncurrent programming for adVancEd aRchiTectures”), an EPSRC-funded project investigating the safety and security of advanced hardware architectures. The project brings together researchers at Sheffield, Kent and Surrey, alongside academic, industrial and governmental partners including ARM, Galois, Defence Science and Technology (DST), and the Universities of Amsterdam, Augsburg, Melbourne and Oldenburg.

Based in Sheffield’s School of Computer Science, the post holder will work with Professor John Derrick (principal investigator), Professor Andrei Popescu (co-investigator), and the wider COVERT team.

Modern hardware architectures increasingly combine complex execution and memory technologies, including out-of-order and speculative execution, weak memory and non-volatile memory. These advances can break assumptions traditionally relied upon by programmers, introducing subtle safety bugs and security vulnerabilities. Concurrent systems are particularly challenging: even well-synchronised programs and algorithms satisfying established correctness criteria such as linearisability may remain vulnerable to security attacks.

COVERT aims to develop reusable models, tools and verification techniques for safety and security across advanced architectures, together with verified concurrency abstractions that balance trustworthy behaviour with performance. The project combines foundational theory, architecture-aware threat models and correctness criteria with practical verification tools, litmus tests and concurrency libraries. Theory and case studies will be mechanised in the Isabelle proof assistant, using examples from MITRE, the Folly concurrency library and industrial partners.

We seek a highly motivated researcher keen to collaborate on groundbreaking verification research and publish in leading conferences and journals.

• Perform research in the project's areas of interest: formal modelling and verification of safety and security properties for advanced hardware architectures.
• Create and adapt any necessary software to do the above.
• Engage the industry partners (e.g., at ARM) to aid the deployment of verification solutions.
• Publish in high-quality outlets (high-profile and reputable conferences and journals), prepare detailed research reports where appropriate (eg as formal project deliverables), and communicate our results to non-academic or non-verification specialist audiences as required, eg to project-wide workshops.
• Plan work to meet project deliverables and be appropriately prepared for supervision and project meetings.
• Carry out administrative roles as required, eg coordinating meetings across various sites.
• Participate in the general collaborative working of the Foundtions of Computation group, eg to present to the group, participate in its seminar meetings, engage in its training events, and demonstrate research to visitors etc.
• As a member of staff you will be encouraged to make ethical decisions in your role, embedding the University sustainability strategy into your working activities wherever possible.
• Contribute to the development of further research proposals.
• Carry out other duties, commensurate with the grade and remit of the post

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