Senior Researcher

Full time: 35 hours per week (part-time working can also be considered)

Fixed-term: 12 months

The Opportunity:

The School of Informatics is seeking a Senior Researcher to be employed to work within the Effect Handler Oriented Programming (EHOP) project. The focus will be on the continuing design, implementation, and evaluation of the WasmFX extension to WebAssembly. There will also be opportunities to engage with other aspects of the EHOP project.

WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a portable low-level bytecode, supported by all major web browsers. WasmFX is an extension of Wasm with effect handlers developed as part of the EHOP project. It provides a uniform target for empowering programming language implementers to directly support a range of first-class control features such as async/await, lightweight threads, and generators.

WasmFX has a full formal specification. It is in the process of standardisation by the WebAssembly Community Group (the de facto standardisation committee for WebAssembly). There are implementations in the official reference interpreter as well as the Wizard and Wasmtime runtimes. Development is also underway of an implementation in the Chrome web browser.

The post holder will be primarily responsible for systematically evaluating the effectiveness of WasmFX using Wasm engines with support for WasmFX (including Wizard and Wasmtime) as well as developing and evaluating backends for research and industrial-strength programming languages (including C, Kotlin, Links, and OCaml), by designing and carrying out appropriate benchmarks. They will work closely with the developers of these engines and languages, and this research will inform the future design of Wasm engines and WasmFX backends as well as the official Wasm standard.

Your skills and attributes for success:

• PhD in Computer Science or related field
• Strong background in the theory of programming language including formal type systems and semantics.
• Significant experience with the implementation of programming languages and their pragmatic design considerations.
• Experience with the practice of software benchmarking and optimization, and in the implementation and delivery of applied software systems, for example in an industrial or research context.
• Substantial experience building production software systems, including in industrial contexts.

Apply Before: 23/10/2025, 23:59

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