Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering (Teaching and Scholarship)

Context: Software engineering is being reshaped by rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly the growing use of generative AI, code assistants, agentic development workflows, automated testing tools, and AI-supported software maintenance environments. These developments are changing not only how software is produced, tested, documented, and evolved, but also the knowledge, judgement, and professional practices expected of future software engineers. As AI becomes embedded within development environments, version-control platforms, testing frameworks, and software project workflows, there is a pressing need to ensure that students are equipped to use these tools effectively, critically, responsibly, and with a strong understanding of software quality, maintainability, accountability, and professional ethics.

The successful candidate: The Department seeks to appoint a Teaching and Scholarship-focused Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering to provide academic leadership in the modernisation of software engineering education across undergraduate and postgraduate provision. This is a fixed term position for 24 months. The successful candidate will help address a clear strategic gap in the Department’s capacity to teach contemporary software engineering, particularly in relation to the responsible use of AI throughout the software development lifecycle. This appointment will support the delivery, renewal, and long-term ownership of key software engineering course units, strengthen capacity in areas such as code comprehension, debugging, testing, maintenance, collaborative development, agile methods, requirements translation, and software architecture, and contribute to the development of new postgraduate provision, including the MSc Software Engineering programme.

The postholder will develop teaching and scholarship that prepares students to engineer reliable, maintainable, scalable, and secure software systems in AI-augmented development environments. This will include teaching students how to interact effectively with generative AI tools, IDE-integrated assistants, automated code generation systems, and agentic software engineering workflows, while retaining critical evaluation, technical ownership, and accountability for the resulting software. The role will also involve developing students’ ability to understand and reuse complex codebases, apply systematic debugging strategies, use Git-based collaborative workflows, translate requirements and bug reports into implementable development tasks, practise test-driven development, use continuous integration, and evaluate the role of AI-supported tools in code synthesis, documentation, refactoring, testing, maintenance, and software project delivery.

A central purpose of the appointment is to ensure that AI is taught not simply as a means of automating programming tasks, but as a transformative influence on the practice, organisation, governance, and professional responsibilities of software engineering. The successful candidate will help students understand where AI tools can add value, where their use introduces risk, and how software engineers should critically assess issues of correctness, reliability, bias, explainability, data governance, intellectual property, security, ethics, and human accountability. The role will also support innovation in assessment design, including agile and scalable approaches that provide personalised feedback while preserving academic integrity and ensuring that students develop demonstrable software engineering competence.

Our benefits include:

• Generous employer contribution pension
• 29 days annual leave plus bank holidays, along with Christmas closure
• Ride to work and EV car scheme available

For more information, please see University of Manchester Benefits. You can also find information on our Flexible and Hybrid working here.

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Name: Professor Andrew Stewart

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