Applied Research Engineer – LLM Training (f/m/d)

Model Trainer For Frontier LLM Research Engineering Team

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 growing our Frontier LLM Research Engineering team with an experienced model trainer who will be responsible for conducting experiments that drive novel research across the entire lifecycle of model training. This involves proposing novel LLM architectures, datamixes, and evaluations to advance our offerings. This role sits at the intersection of research and engineering and requires a strong coding and AI science background.

The goal of our Frontier team is to own the entire lifecycle of model training. This role will contribute to research across a wide range of topics, including (continuous) pre-training, post-training, and synthetic data generation, with a strong emphasis on scalable training and data pipelines. Since the model artifacts produced by Frontier will power our product offerings, we expect the successful candidate to be excited about language model applications and their real-world use cases.

Your Responsibilities:

• Research and develop novel approaches and algorithms that improve training of foundation models for practical use in real-world applications
• Develop large-scale, robust, distributed training and data generation pipelines
• Analyze and benchmark state-of-the-art as well as new approaches in LLM research
• Collaborate with scientists and engineers at Aleph Alpha, Aleph Alpha Research, external industrial and academic partners, and directly with customers
• Publish own and collaborative work on machine learning venues, and release code and models for use by the broader research community

Your Profile:

Basic Qualifications

• Recent experience addressing complex, cutting-edge AI challenges, with expertise in at least one of: distributed training, training data, model architectures
• Advanced knowledge of transformers, deep learning concepts and practices, and ideally experience coding and pretraining LLMs from scratch
• Strong software engineering skills, with expertise in Python and related deep-learning frameworks (PyTorch)
• Experience with shipping production-ready models, building on open-source AI libraries
• Proven ability to apply advanced scientific methods to novel problems, resulting in impactful outputs such as publications or projects
• Willingness to work from Heidelberg, Berlin, or in a hybrid setup within Germany; we value in-person collaboration and will cover all travel expenses to our Research HQ in Heidelberg for occasional onsite work

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in machine learning or related fields with publications in top tier ML/AI venues (eg NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EMNLP, NAACL, ACL, etc)
• Experience writing kernels for GPUs (with CUDA, Triton, etc.)
• Production-level skills with at least one other programming language, especially systems languages (Rust, C/C++, Go, etc.)
• 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

What You Can Expect From Us:

• Become part of an AI revolution, contribute to Aleph Alpha's mission to provide technological sovereignty
• Work with international industry and academic experts
• Share parts of your work via publications and source-available code
• An inspiring working environment with short lines of communication, horizontal organization, and great team spirit
• 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