BOLD Fellow Positions: A New UKRI-Funded Fundamental AI Lab at Oxford, UCL & Imperial

Twelve fully-funded Fellow positions. Full academic freedom. Up to £30M in funding and access to thousands of H100-equivalent GPUs. A newly merged lab spanning three of the UK's top universities is looking for exceptional researchers ready to aim higher.

If you've been doing great work at a frontier lab or in academia and have been wondering whether there's a setup built for genuinely ambitious, open-science AI research — this is that setup.

About BOLD

The British Open-ended Learning & Discovery Lab (BOLD) is a newly established, UKRI/EPSRC-funded AI research lab bringing together more than 80 leading fundamental-AI researchers from Oxford, UCL, and Imperial into a single, critical-mass lab dedicated to paradigm-breaking, open-source, open-science discovery. It's led by Jakob Foerster, Tim Rocktäschel, Laura Toni, Ani Calinescu, and Antoine Cully.

BOLD was formed on the belief that academic research can still be ambitious, adventurous, and genuinely cool — with the agency, funding, and compute to back that up: up to £30M over six years, and access to 3M GPU hours on Isambard now, scaling toward 5,000 H100-equivalent.

🔗 More about BOLD Lab

About the Role

BOLD is recruiting up to 12 Fellows across Oxford, UCL, and Imperial. These are 12-month posts with full academic freedom and highly competitive salaries — up to £84,663 — with options being explored to accommodate different levels of seniority and potential contract extensions. Researchers joining during a sabbatical are also welcome.

Fellows will play a leading role in the management of BOLD Lab and take responsibility for developing its strategic and scientific direction — co-leading research groups, contributing to the overarching vision, and mentoring more junior researchers and doctoral students.

Who They're Looking For

BOLD has laid out a few examples of the kind of person they'd love to hear from:

• You finished a PhD in machine learning a couple of years ago and have been doing great work at a frontier lab, pushing the limits of the current paradigm — now you think it's time to aim higher.

• You're about to finish a stellar ML PhD during which your contributions have started to shape the field.

• You finished a stellar ML PhD and have been doing a postdoc since.

• You're an academic in ML leading your own group, but you've been wondering whether this is really the right setup to make a difference.

• You're brilliant and a great team player — you focus on creating exponentially larger pies rather than fighting over the size of your slice.

If any of that sounds like you, or like someone you know, BOLD wants your application.

How to Apply

👉 View the Fellow position and apply
📁 Additional materials about BOLD and the role

Since these 12 posts are spread across three universities, check the live listing at each institution for the most current status and deadlines — the Oxford posting, for instance, has listed a mid-September 2026 closing date, so don't wait to follow up if you're interested.

📣 Announcement on X/Twitter
📣 Announcement on LinkedIn

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