FP Launchpad is accepting applications for its inaugural cohort of Post-Baccalaureate Fellows. We are looking for 8 Fellows to join us at IIT Madras for a fully funded, two-year research fellowship starting later this year.

This post describes what the fellowship is, who it is for, and what comes after.

Why this exists

AI coding agents are making software increasingly accessible and enabling its production at unprecedented scale. That is exciting, but it also introduces far-reaching consequences for civic society. Software that governs elections, manages public infrastructure, and mediates access to services needs more than convenience. It needs mathematical guardrails: correctness guarantees, memory safety, principled concurrency, formal verification. The people who can build and maintain such software are in short supply, and the gap between demand and opportunity in India is acute. FP Launchpad exists to close that gap.

What the fellowship is

The fellowship sits at the centre of everything FP Launchpad does. Fellows work full-time on ambitious projects in systems and functional programming: building real systems, publishing at top venues, and contributing to open-source software that people depend on. The OCaml programming language and the OxCaml extensions are the primary research vehicles, but the problems cut across programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, formal verification, concurrency, security, and AI-augmented software engineering. For more on what is expected, see the FP Launchpad charter.

The core idea is a tight feedback loop between research and real systems. Research hypotheses are explored by building and deploying actual software, not isolated prototypes. When something breaks in deployment, that feeds back into the research. When a new idea works in the lab, it gets pushed into production. This is the model behind OxCaml at Jane Street, where a principled, fast-moving language is used in production at scale, failures are caught early, and rolled back safely. FP Launchpad aims to capture that same spirit.

You will not work in isolation. You will be part of a cohort of 8 fellows, working alongside each other, learning from each other, and building a shared culture. You will be mentored by FP Launchpad faculty and interact with members of our advisory board, including researchers and engineers from Jane Street, Purdue, UC San Diego, Brown, Cambridge, Microsoft Research, and elsewhere. You will have funded trips to present your work at international conferences, workshops, and summer/winter schools, as well as funded visiting researcher positions at partner universities around the world, where there is collaboration and mutual interest.

Fellows have real agency in shaping their research direction. You will arrive with interests and ideas, and together with your mentors, define the problems you work on. The application asks what you want to build. We take that seriously.

Ramachandra Rao on Ramanujan: 'He never craved for any distinction. He wanted leisure; in other words, that simple food should be provided for him without exertion on his part and that he should be allowed to dream on.'

When Ramachandra Rao first met Ramanujan in Madras, he noted that the young mathematician never craved distinction. What he wanted was leisure: “that simple food should be provided for him without exertion on his part and that he should be allowed to dream on.” The fellowship is built in that spirit. Its point is to give you the time, the mentorship, and the intellectual space to do work that matters, and to figure out what kind of work you want to spend your life doing. But it is also bigger than any individual fellow. You will be contributing to the open-source commons, to India’s systems research capacity, and become the next generation of maintainers for foundational software.

Who this is for

We want people who enjoy making sense of chaotic systems. People who look at a garbage collector, a network stack, or a distributed consensus protocol and feel compelled to understand why it works the way it does, and then want to make it better using principled tools: type systems, formal methods, programming language design.

We want people who want to solve real problems. Not toy benchmarks, but problems like: building a verifiable voting system on RISC-V hardware and MirageOS unikernels, creating programmable public infrastructure for environmental planning, or writing a formally verified runtime system for a production language. These are illustrative projects from our charter, the kind of work fellows will shape and drive. The projects use OCaml and OxCaml as their foundation.

In your application package, we want to see evidence of building, code you have written, bugs you have debugged, systems you have deployed and open-source contributions. It does not matter if the projects are small. What matters is that they are yours.

Prerequisites

The fellowship assumes a certain starting point. Here is how to know if it is a good fit for you right now.

You should be a programmer who has built things from scratch, not just followed tutorials or used frameworks. You should be able to point to code you have written and explain the decisions in it. Strong C/C++ skills are expected. Exposure to OCaml, Haskell, Rust, or a similar language is a plus, but not required.

You should have some evidence of building beyond coursework. This could be open-source contributions, personal projects, research prototypes, or a hard bug you tracked down. The projects do not need to be large. They need to be genuinely yours.

You should be comfortable with the expectation that fellows publish at top venues, contribute to real open-source projects. This is not a part-time position, and you are expected to work full-time on campus at IIT Madras. The fellowship is demanding, and that is the point.

If you are interested but feel you are not quite ready, that is fine. Start with the systems foundations to hack on the OCaml compiler and the ecosystem, and apply when you are. This is the first cohort, and there will be future ones.

What comes after

A two-year fellowship is long enough to do serious work and short enough to be a launching pad, not a destination. Here are the paths fellows can take:

MS/PhD at IIT Madras. Fellows can earn course credits during the fellowship. If eligible, you can transition into a degree programme at IIT Madras, continuing your research momentum while earning a graduate degree. See Pathways to IIT Madras for an overview of how this works.

Graduate school worldwide. The fellowship gives you publications, strong recommendation letters, and the research maturity to apply to top PhD and MS programmes globally. Fellows will have worked with world-class researchers and will carry a demonstrated track record of systems research.

Industry with open-source credentials. Two years of meaningful contributions to production open-source systems are a powerful signal. Fellows will leave with a portfolio of real work, not class assignments, that speaks directly to the best systems roles in the industry.

Found a company. The technology you build here could be the seed. IIT Madras has one of India’s strongest startup ecosystems, with an incubation cell and research park designed to turn research into companies. If you want to turn research into a product, this is a good place to start.

How to apply

Applications are open now. The deadline is 20 April 2026.

Apply Now

The application asks about your motivation, your technical background, your programming experience, and a code sample you have written from scratch. It is not long, but it is not superficial either. We read every application carefully.

If you have questions, reach out to careers@fplaunchpad.org.

If you have been looking for the right place to do serious work, apply.