Reference: 460_20_AII_AI_RE3

Job title: Senior Research Engineer (RE3)

About BSC

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU, the Joint Undertaking that leads large-scale investments and HPC provision in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 1000 staff from 60 countries.

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We are particularly interested for this role in the strengths and lived experiences of women and underrepresented groups to help us avoid perpetuating biases and oversights in science and IT research. In instances of equal merit, the incorporation of the under-represented sex will be favoured.

We promote Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, fostering an environment where each and every one of us is appreciated for who we are, regardless of our differences.

If you consider that you do not meet all the requirements, we encourage you to continue applying for the job offer. We value diversity of experiences and skills, and you could bring unique perspectives to our team.

Context And Mission

The AI Institute at BSC has consolidated experience in several areas of language technology and generative AI, such as the development of large open language models (the Salamandra/ALIA family), machine translation and unsupervised learning for under-resourced languages and domains. It has been entrusted by the Spanish and the Catalan governments, through the ALIA and AINA initiatives, to develop fundamental open-source resources and technologies for Spanish, Catalan and the other co-official languages.

Within the AI Institute, the Applied Intelligence group is the bridge between this research and its real-world use. The group works with public administrations, companies and research partners to turn BSC models and infrastructure into working solutions: it scopes use cases, builds pilots and proofs of concept (conversational and agentic assistants, retrieval-augmented generation, information extraction, model evaluation) and advises external organisations on how to adopt open, sovereign and regulation-compliant AI.

A growing part of this activity is channelled through BSC Connects, BSC’s public–private collaboration programme with companies, and through the BSC AI Factory, one of the EuroHPC AI Factories, which offers startups, SMEs, industry and public bodies access to MareNostrum 5 together with specialised R&D, consultancy and training services.

We are looking for a Senior Research Engineer to act as technical lead in these collaborations: someone able to understand a partner’s problem, design and prototype an AI-based solution on BSC infrastructure, evaluate it rigorously, and communicate the results to both technical and non-technical audiences.

This project is funded by the European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, in accordance with Council Regulation (EU) 2020/2094 of 14 December 2020, and regulated by Regulation (EU) 2021/241 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 February 2021, in the context of the “BSC AI Factory” project.

This project has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101234399 and Spain, Portugal, Romania and Türkiye. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme. It is also co-funded by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service and counts with the support of the Government of Catalonia.

Key Duties

• Lead the technical scoping of collaborations with companies and public administrations, in particular within the BSC Connects programme and the BSC AI Factory: identifying challenges, assessing feasibility and data readiness, and translating partner requirements into proposals, work plans and technical specifications, working alongside project management.

• Provide expert advice and hands-on technical support to AI Factory users (startups, SMEs, industry and public sector) on model selection, adaptation (fine-tuning, RAG, alignment), deployment and efficient use of MareNostrum 5 and other BSC AI infrastructures.

• Design and develop pilots and proofs of concept based on large language models and other AI technologies, such as conversational and agentic assistants, retrieval-augmented generation, function calling and tool use (e.g. MCP) and information extraction, prioritising BSC open models (Salamandra/ALIA) where suitable.

• Deploy and serve models with efficient inference stacks (e.g. vLLM, llama.cpp, OpenAI-compatible endpoints), from HPC to workstation-class platforms, benchmarking quality, latency and cost to inform partners’ decisions.

• Plan, design and implement the evaluation of models, platforms and applications (including performance in Catalan and Spanish, safety and guardrails) to assess solution capabilities and determine the most relevant development options to deliver impactful outcomes.

• Contribute to the assessment of the regulatory and ethical aspects of proposed solutions (EU AI Act, data protection, technological sovereignty) and to the application of BSC AI model development guidelines.

• Write technical deliverables, reports and documentation in English (and in Spanish or Catalan when required by partners), in close collaboration with software developers and project managers, and keep track of the effort and services delivered.

• Monitor and evaluate feedback from users and partners, identify improvement actions, and feed lessons learned back into the group’s reusable tools, templates and best practices.

• Contribute to the preparation of competitive proposals (European, national and regional calls) and to business development activities together with BSC’s innovation and business development teams.

• Mentor junior engineers and students, and coordinate small technical teams within specific collaborations.

• Create and deliver talks, training sessions and workshops about AI and its applications, in top-tier technical forums, for BSC Connects and AI Factory participants, and in dissemination settings for non-specialist audiences.

Requirements

• Education

  • PhD degree in computer science, software engineering, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics/linguistics or equivalent

• Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience

  • Experience in project management related tasks: scoping, task planning and tracking, time management, effort reporting and deliverable writing.
  • Experience working with external stakeholders (companies, public administrations, technology transfer or consultancy), translating their needs into technical solutions, ideally through the delivery of pilots or proofs of concept.
  • Demonstrated participation in international projects, preferably European Framework Programme projects (e.g. Horizon Europe, Digital Europe) and international collaborations.
  • Demonstrated knowledge of AI development workflows: pretraining, post-training, alignment, adaptation and evaluation.
  • Hands-on experience building LLM-based applications: retrieval-augmented generation, agents, tool use and function calling, prompt engineering, and their systematic evaluation.
  • Demonstrated experience with several language processing and AI inference and serving platforms (e.g. vLLM, the Hugging Face ecosystem, llama.cpp, OpenAI-compatible APIs).
  • Demonstrated experience in the integration and evaluation of NLP tools for the exploitation of unstructured information (information extraction, text mining).
  • Demonstrated experience with standard data formats in language technologies and with text annotation.

• Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience

  • Experience with HPC environments (Slurm, containers) and GPU-based workloads; familiarity with MareNostrum 5 will be valued.
  • Experience in technology transfer, innovation programmes or advisory services for SMEs, startups or the public sector.
  • Knowledge of AI regulation and responsible AI practices (EU AI Act, GDPR), including safety and guardrail models.
  • Advanced programming skills in Python, and good software engineering practices (Git, CI/CD, Docker).
  • Strong linguistic background in annotation and development of language resources (corpora, vocabularies, lexica).

• Competences

  • Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-specialist audiences and to build trust with external partners.
  • Client-oriented mindset, autonomy and the ability to manage several collaborations in parallel with changing priorities and tight deadlines. Team player, willing to mentor junior members and to collaborate across BSC departments and research groups.
  • Fluency in spoken and written English, Spanish and Catalan; fluency in other European languages will also be valued.

Conditions

• The position will be located at BSC within the Life Sciences Department

• We offer a full-time contract (35h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance, support to the relocation procedures

• Duration: Open-ended contract due to technical and scientific activities linked to the project and budget duration

• Holidays: 22 days of holidays + 6 personal days + 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement

• Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona

• Starting date: ASAP

Applications procedure and process

All applications must be submitted via the BSC website and contain:

• A full CV in English including contact details

• A cover/motivation letter with a statement of interest in English, clearly specifying for which specific area and topics the applicant wishes to be considered. Additionally, two references for further contacts must be included. Applications without this document will not be considered.

Development of the recruitment process

The selection will be carried out through a competitive examination system ("Concurso-Oposición"). The recruitment process consists of two phases:

• Curriculum Analysis: Evaluation of previous experience and/or scientific history, degree, training, and other professional information relevant to the position. - 40 points
• Interview phase: The highest-rated candidates at the curriculum level will be invited to the interview phase, conducted by the corresponding department and Human Resources. In this phase, technical competencies, knowledge, skills, and professional experience related to the position, as well as the required personal competencies, will be evaluated. - 60 points. A minimum of 30 points out of 60 must be obtained to be eligible for the position.

The recruitment panel will be composed of at least three people, ensuring at least 25% representation of women.

In accordance with OTM-R principles, a gender-balanced recruitment panel is formed for each vacancy at the beginning of the process. After reviewing the content of the applications, the panel will begin the interviews, with at least one technical and one administrative interview. At a minimum, a personality questionnaire as well as a technical exercise will be conducted during the process.

The panel will make a final decision, and all individuals who participated in the interview phase will receive feedback with details on the acceptance or rejection of their profile.

At BSC, we seek continuous improvement in our recruitment processes. For any suggestions or comments/complaints about our recruitment processes, please contact recruitment [at] bsc [dot] es. For more information, please follow this link.

Deadline

The vacancy will remain open until a suitable candidate has been hired. Applications will be regularly reviewed and potential candidates will be contacted.

OTM-R principles for selection processes

BSC-CNS is committed to the principles of the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers of the European Commission and the Open, Transparent and Merit-based Recruitment principles (OTM-R). This is applied for any potential candidate in all our processes, for example by creating gender-balanced recruitment panels and recognizing career breaks etc. BSC-CNS is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We are pleased to consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or any other basis protected by applicable state or local law. For more information follow this link