The role of Public Engagement Researcher provides an excellent opportunity for an individual passionate about ensuring qualitative, participatory and deliberative engagement methods enable a diverse range of voices to influence and inform issues of technology, social inequalities, and justice. 

This position is a new one for the Ada Lovelace Institute, and the primary responsibility will be to help develop and execute Ada’s public engagement work. This will include working with a Senior Researcher to develop and deliver a deliberative ‘lived experience panel’ as part of a project exploring the interaction between data technologies and social and health inequalities.  

The Researcher will also be tasked with staying abreast of developments in the field, supporting Ada’s wider qualitative and quantitative public engagement and research, and communicating about our work in writing and in-person.  

This is a unique and exciting opportunity to join a dynamic and energetic organisation working at the intersection of technology and society on some of the most pressing social policy and technical challenges.   

About you  

You will have knowledge about or experience in engaging with people and communities to understand their perspectives and help their voice influence research, policy or technology design in practice. This could involve coordinating community workshops, leading qualitative focus groups, designing quantitative surveys, supporting deliberative and user-led participatory research, or any other kind of activity that involves members of the public in informing and influencing research, policy and practice. We are open to different forms of experience and interested in hearing how you define community and public engagement.  

You may have a background working in the tech industry, or researching and co-ordinating in an academic organisation, research institute or community charity. You may have a university degree, or have gained experience from an apprenticeship or trainee programme at a research, policy or other civil-society organisation.  

You are curious and passionate about the issues which arise at the intersection of technology and society, and committed to bringing an interdisciplinary and intersectional lens to understanding them. You’ll enjoy working in a team environment, willing to jump into projects and keen to explore areas of policy, technology and practice that you don’t already understand. You’ll appreciate the importance of exceptionally high standards of rigour in research, but also want to think creatively about communicating and influencing in novel ways.  

For further information about the role, please click here to download the full job description and a description of the day in the life of a Researcher.  

Further information and how to apply 

The closing date for applications is 12:00 midday (BST) on Tuesday 13 July 2021, with interviews taking place via video on Wednesday 28th and Thursday 29th July 2021. 

We strongly encourage applicants from backgrounds that are underrepresented in the research, policy and technology sectors (for example those from a marginalised community, who did not go to university or had free school meals as a child). We are committed to tackling societal injustice and inequality through our work, and believe that all kinds of experiences and backgrounds can contribute to this mission.  

Please note: due to the need for someone to start quickly we are looking for candidates who already have the right to work in the UK and are currently based in the UK.    

The Ada Lovelace Institute 

The Ada Lovelace Institute is an independent research institute and deliberative body funded and incubated by the Nuffield Foundation in 2018. Our mission is to ensure data and artificial intelligence work for people and society. We do this by building evidence and fostering rigorous debate on how data and AI affect people and society.  We recognise the power asymmetries that exist in ethical and legal debates around the development of data-driven technologies and seek to level those asymmetries by convening diverse voices and creating a shared understanding of the ethical issues arising from data and AI. Finally, we seek to define and inform good practice in the design and deployment of AI technologies.    

After little more than a year of operation, the Institute has emerged as a leading independent voice on the ethical and societal impacts of data and AI. We have built relationships in the public, private and civil society sectors in the UK and internationally. Some of our most impactful work to date includes our rapid evidence review on contact tracing apps, Exit Through the App Store?, and our public attitudes and engagement work on biometrics, including our Beyond Face Value survey and Citizens’ Biometrics Council.    

We aim to be a collaborative, welcome and informal place to work. Before Covid-19 the team worked flexibly, with some working from home regularly or on an ad hoc basis. We now operate fully remotely, using collaborative working tools such as Microsoft Teams with regular video calls). We are currently a 15-person team and expect to return to in-person working for the majority of the week from September 2021, but we are open to requests to work remotely, including from UK geographical locations outside of London.