Vacant job

Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) is a specialized university with close collaboration with industry and society. The operations are located on campus in Karlskrona. As a government agency, BTH conducts education and research of high quality with a clear focus on development, innovation, and societal benefit.

The Department of Software Engineering comprises approximately 50 people from 20 different countries. Our tradition in software engineering dates back to 1990 when we launched Sweden's first education in the field in collaboration with Ericsson. The department's research and educational environment, SERL Sweden – Software Engineering Research and Education Lab Sweden, has expanded since then and is now positioned as a world leader in software development research. The department is responsible for software engineering education from the bachelor's level up to the doctoral level.

Job Description

As a doctoral student in this position, you are expected to investigate how AI agents support and reshape the process of requirements elicitation and development (AI4RE), as well as how continuous adaptation during the operation of AI-intensive systems challenges conventional methods in requirements engineering (RE4AI). The work examines how agent-based pipelines, i.e., agents that support requirements elicitation, runtime drift detection, and specification, introduce new adversarial attack surfaces that conventional RE methods are not equipped to handle. This requires new approaches to requirements provenance, modeling stakeholder trust, and continuous validation.

The project delves into the security and robustness of continuous requirements development, focusing on threat vectors such as data poisoning of evidence streams at runtime, adversarial manipulation of stakeholders across multiple requirements elicitation cycles, and prompt injection attacks targeting LLM-based RE agents. The research is also planned to investigate how fundamental concepts such as requirements completeness, traceability, verifiability, and human oversight should be redefined in the presence of probabilistic outputs, non-deterministic agent behavior, and continuous data dependencies, as well as how these factors affect the reliability and regulatory compliance of developed requirement artifacts.

The research will be conducted in collaboration with various industry partners. The main tasks include:

• Investigating how agent-based RE pipelines introduce adversarial vulnerabilities at the data, stakeholder, and agent levels.
• Developing a threat model for continuous requirements engineering, including attack vectors and their effects throughout the entire requirements development pipeline.
• Designing an architecture for adversarially robust continuous RE, including provenance tracking, stakeholder trust mechanisms, defense against prompt injection, and verification gates with human involvement.
• Analyzing regulatory compliance implications of continuously changing requirements within emerging regulations such as the EU AI Act, focusing on high-risk AI systems in healthcare, critical infrastructure, and low-code platforms.

For this position, we are looking for a candidate with a background in software engineering, requirements management, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.

The rules and benefits for doctoral students in Sweden apply to this position. The doctoral student will develop an individual study plan in software engineering together with their supervisors. The position may include up to 20 percent other duties, such as teaching at the undergraduate and advanced levels.

Qualifications

To be employed as a doctoral student, the applicant must be or become admitted to doctoral-level education.

Eligible for admission to doctoral-level education is someone who has completed an advanced degree in a technical, mathematical, or natural science field, or who has otherwise acquired knowledge to be able to benefit from doctoral-level education in the subject.

The eligibility requirements must be met at the time of admission, not at the time of applying for the position.

Desirable Competencies and Experiences

In addition to the requirements described in the job description and the eligibility requirements for employment, the following degrees, competencies, and experiences are considered desirable:

• Master's degree or Master of Science in Engineering in software engineering, software development, data science, AI, or computer science.
• Documented professional experience in software development.
• Experience or interest in development within artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• Very good skills in written and oral communication in English.

Place of Work: Karlskrona.

Employment Extent: 100%.

Start Date: Early autumn 2026, exact start date by agreement.

Duration: Fixed-term employment for up to 4 years of research time. In the first stage, the employment covers one year, after which it is renewed for up to two years at a time, provided that the individual study plan is followed. The employment may include up to 20% other duties, whereby the time can be extended to a maximum of 5 years.

Application Deadline: August 15, 2026.

Your application should include:

• A statement of your background and experience in areas relevant to the position.
• A curriculum vitae (CV).
• Degree and course certificates officially issued by your educational institution.
• Contact details for two reference persons.
• The earliest date the employment can commence.
• An appendix with existing publications (if relevant).
• A link to your thesis (latest/highest degree).

You apply via our recruitment system by clicking the "Apply" button below. If you have protected personal data, you should not register your application in our recruitment system. Instead, contact the HR partner listed as the contact person in the advertisement for more information. Instructions for applicants are available at https://www.bth.se/om-bth/jobba-hos-oss/lediga-jobb (https://www.bth.se/om-bth/jobba-hos-oss/lediga-jobb). As an applicant, you are responsible for ensuring the application is complete in accordance with the advertisement and instructions. BTH welcomes applicants with different backgrounds and experiences. We actively work to capitalize on the qualities that diversity and gender balance bring to the operations. We have chosen media for this recruitment and therefore decline contact with advertising sellers or other sellers for recruitment services.