Senior AI Researcher (f/m/d)

Aleph Alpha Research’s mission is to deliver category-defining AI innovation that enables open, accessible, and trustworthy deployment of GenAI in industrial applications. Our organization develops foundational models and next-generation methods that make it easy and affordable for Aleph Alpha’s customers to increase productivity in finance, administration, R&D, logistics, and manufacturing processes.

We are hiring to grow our org with offices in Heidelberg, Germany, and are looking for well-rounded, experienced AI researchers with a strong engineering profile and backgrounds in machine learning, foundational models, distributed computing, and AI accelerators.

As a Senior AI Researcher in Aleph Alpha Research, you develop new approaches towards differentiating target capabilities, as defined by our researchers and engineers by working backwards from our mission as well as innovating on behalf of our customers. You work in an interdisciplinary SE team of your own choice consisting of senior and junior AI Researchers and AI SW Engineers, and develop solutions from idea to production.

Your goals depend on the chosen team and focus – you increase the data and compute efficiency of the foundational model training and inference, from data preprocessing and augmentation, through pre-training, model fine-tuning and multi-modality, to accelerated inference. Or you devise novel approaches to make GenAI more fair with regard to previously unseen languages and domains, and make LLM-based systems inspectable, understandable, validatable, and robust to hallucinations or other failure modes. You enable users to control the behaviour and ethics of models at deployment time, and you develop systems that generalize to yet unseen tasks.

Your responsibilities

• Research and development of novel approaches and algorithms that improve training and inference of foundation models for practical use in real-world applications 

• Development, training, and maintenance of deep learning models 

• Analysis and benchmarking of state-of-the-art as well as new approaches 

• Collaborating with scientists and engineers at Aleph Alpha, IPAI Aleph Alpha Research, chosen external industrial and academic partners, as well as directly with customers 

• Publishing own and collaborative work on machine learning venues, and making code and models source-available for use by the broader research community 

• Engaging in our hiring process and otherwise developing, growing, and mentoring junior scientists 

Your profile

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience addressing complex AI challenges, with expertise in one or more of the following: self-supervised learning, natural language processing, multi-modal modeling, reinforcement learning, or explainable deep learning.

• Proven ability to apply advanced scientific methods to novel problems, resulting in impactful outputs such as publications or projects.

• Proficiency in Python and at least one major deep-learning framework (e.g., PyTorch), with experience implementing advanced methods like transformers or modifying their core structures.

• Solid understanding of AI/ML techniques, algorithms, tools, and end-to-end system deployment, including preprocessing pipelines on cloud infrastructure.

• PhD in machine learning, computer science, or a related field, with demonstrated thought leadership in research or technical innovation.

• Ready to relocate to Heidelberg, Germany, or otherwise come to our Heidelberg office regularly, potentially weekly.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated leadership in pioneering research or influencing organizational research agendas through high-impact contributions and top-tier publications.

• Experience training and deploying large-scale machine learning models (10B+ parameters) and driving innovation in their design or implementation.

• Fluency in writing scientific documentation and proposals, with strong public speaking skills in scientific contexts.

• Strong collaborative and interpersonal skills, with a track record of contributing to a multidisciplinary team's technical and strategic success.

Our tenets

We believe embodying these values would make you a great fit in our team:

• We own work end-to-end, from idea to production: You take responsibility for every stage of the process, ensuring that our work is complete, scalable, and of the highest quality.

• We ship what matters: Your focus is on solving real problems for our customers and the research community. You prioritize delivering impactful solutions that bring value and make a difference.

• We work transparently: You collaborate and share your results openly with the team, partners, customers, and the broader community through publishing and sharing results and insight including blogposts, papers, checkpoints, and more.

• We innovate through leveraging our intrinsic motivations and talents: We strive for technical depth and to balance ideas and interests of our team with our mission-backwards approach, and leverage the interdisciplinary, diverse perspectives in our teamwork.

What you can expect from us

• Become part of an AI revolution!

• 30 days of paid vacation

• Access to a variety of fitness & wellness offerings via Wellhub

• Mental health support through nilo.health

• Substantially subsidized company pension plan for your future security

• Subsidized Germany-wide transportation ticket

• Budget for additional technical equipment

• Flexible working hours for better work-life balance and hybrid working model

• Virtual Stock Option Plan

• JobRad® Bike Lease