Research Assistant, TraceGuard

City St George’s, University of London is the University of business, practice and the professions and brings together the expertise and excellence of City, University of London and St George’s, University of London into one institution. The combined university is now one of the largest higher education destinations for London students, combining a breadth of disciplines across health, business, policy, law, creativity, communications, science and technology. Our students are at the heart of everything that we do, and we are committed to supporting them to pursue their career and personal ambitions. Our research is engaged, at the frontier of practice and has a positive impact on the world around us.City St George’s, University of London is seeking a research assistant to work on TraceGuard, an Innovate UK project developing a system-level verification platform for secure software supply chains.

The project focuses on verifying how authority and permissions propagate across interconnected services, APIs, workflows, and third-party components. The postdoc will contribute to research on formal modelling and verification, delegated authority, policy constraints, trace-based assurance, and runtime verification of distributed software behaviour.

The successful candidate is expected to contribute to the following main duties:

· developing models for authority delegation and execution-chain tracing;

· designing verification methods for least privilege, scope preservation, revocation consistency, and policy compliance;

· contributing to prototype tooling for CI/CD, API, cloud, and service-based environments;

· evaluating trace completeness, policy enforcement, and verification latency;

· working with EarthID and project partners to support validation in representative enterprise environments.

Candidates should have MSc or equivalent experience, in computer science, cybersecurity, formal methods, software engineering, distributed systems, or a related field. Experience with runtime verification, access control, cloud-native systems, CI/CD pipelines, APIs, service meshes, or software supply chain security would be advantageous.

This post is suitable for a researcher interested in applied cybersecurity, formal verification, secure-by-design systems, and deployable research outputs for real-world software supply chain assurance.

Closing dates for internal applications: 31 August 2026 (Monday Bank holiday) at 11;59pm.

Closing date for external applications: 19 September 2026 at 11:59pm

For more information about the role please refer to the job description.

The selection process will involve an interview. Further details will be confirmed at the interview stage.

City St George’s offers a sector-leading salary, pension scheme and benefits including a comprehensive package of staff training and development. City St George’s, University of London is committed to promoting equality, diversity and inclusion in all its activities, processes, and culture for our whole community, including staff, students and visitors.

We welcome applications regardless of age, caring responsibilities, disability, gender identity, gender reassignment, marital status, nationality, pregnancy, race and ethnic origin, religion and belief, sex, sexual orientation and socio-economic background. City St George’s operates a guaranteed interview scheme for disabled applicants. The University of business, practice and the professions.