Overview

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 development, engineering, logistics, and manufacturing processes.

We are hiring to grow our org in Heidelberg, Germany, and are looking for well-rounded, experienced Research Software Engineers with experience in DevOps/MLOps.

As a Research Software Engineer in Aleph Alpha Research, you help the research teams take model and algorithm development to the next level. You own significant portions of the research infrastructure, including the pipelines related to data processing, our testing infrastructure and engineering-heavy parts of our distributed training software. You will also have the chance to contribute your software engineering experience to research projects in areas such as tokenization, agent interfaces, data generation, and thus have significant influence on our ability to deliver novel category-defining AI capabilities.

You devise and implement robust and maintainable complex systems that make POCs, ablation studies, new algorithmic capabilities, as well as their transition into production a great experience for research and product development teams alike. You likewise co-own efforts that aim to make parts of our code source-available to the broader research community.

Your responsibilities

Depending on your profile, you will contribute to one or more of the following areas:

Design and (continuous) development of the research infrastructure, establish mechanisms that improve code quality, testing, and feature delivery
Support the development, training, and maintenance of deep learning models, in collaboration with the researchers as well as the SW/HW engineers at our distributed computation centers
Developing and optimizing lower-level code for data processing, tokenization, or research projects
Contributing your software-engineering expertise to research projects (this could be, for example, in areas such as agent interfaces or data generation)
Help production AI research innovations into real-world applications
Engaging in our hiring process and otherwise mentoring engineers and researchers in terms of software development best practices
Most of our training code is written in Python , with PyTorch being our main deep learning framework. Some of our lower-level code is written in Rust .

Your profile

Basic Qualifications

3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
2+ years of non-internship design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience
Experience programming with at least one software programming language
Ready to relocate to Heidelberg, Germany
Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent

Preferred Qualifications

5+ years of full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations experience, as well as architecting (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems
Track record in building complex software systems (with or without machine-learning components), e.g., via open-source project contributions
Experience with systems programming and low-level code, e.g. with Rust
Strong sense of ownership and customer-centricity. Passionate about building quality software and improving operational excellence, and demonstrated ability to achieve stretch goals in a highly innovative and fast-paced team environment
Master's degree in computer science or related field

We do not require prior experience in machine learning for this role, but we do value your eagerness to learn. If you have prior experience in ML, we will be particularly excited about:

Experience in the productization of AI research innovations into real-world applications, ideally with a focus on large-scale data processing and distributed computation for foundational model training or inference
Familiarity with popular NLP tools and frameworks such as PyTorch or HF transformers, knowledge of transformer architectures

What you can expect from us

Become part of an AI revolution, contribute to Aleph Alpha’s mission to provide technological sovereignty
Join a dynamic startup and a rapidly growing team  
Work with international industry and academic experts
Share parts of your work via publications and source-available code
Take on responsibility and shape our company and technology  
Flexible working hours
An inspiring working environment with short lines of communication, horizontal organization, and great team spirit

About us

Aleph Alpha was founded in 2019 with the mission to research and build the foundational technology for an era of strong AI. The team of international scientists, engineers, and innovators researches, develops, and deploys transformative AI like large language and multimodal models and runs the fastest European commercial AI cluster. Its generative AI solutions are the only choice for enterprises and governmental institutions seeking to retain independence, secure their data, and build trustworthy solutions.