Senior AI Software Engineer (f/m/d)

<p>Aleph Alpha Research’s mission is to deliver AI innovation that enables open, accessible, and trustworthy deployment of GenAI in enterprise 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&amp;D, logistics, and manufacturing processes. We do this with a flat hierarchy and IC-driven culture: ideas come from the bottom up, and it’s our shared responsibility to deliver impactful research.</p><p></p><p><strong>We’re looking for top Senior Software Engineers to join our research team, headquartered in Heidelberg. While we highly value in-person work, we offer the flexibility to work from Berlin or elsewhere in Germany and with regular travel to onsite events.</strong></p><p></p><p>As a (Senior) AI Software Engineer in Aleph Alpha Research, you help the research teams train models and iterate on ideas. You own significant portions of the research infrastructure, including data processing pipelines, our model lineage tooling, our testing infrastructure, our cluster management systems and engineering-heavy parts of our distributed training software.</p><p></p><p>We build and train large-scale models using <strong>Python</strong> and <strong>PyTorch</strong>. Our infrastructure runs in our own data centre on <strong>Kubernetes</strong>, managed by a dedicated team. You'll work on systems that handle petabytes of data and contribute to optimising our distributed training software to run efficiently over entire clusters. This is high-scale, high-impact engineering.</p><p></p><h2><strong>Your responsibilities</strong></h2><p>You can expect to contribute to the following areas:</p><ul><li><p>Design and develop tooling to accelerate research.</p></li><li><p>Collaborate with researchers to develop, train, persist and evaluate deep learning models.</p></li><li><p>Deep-dive on performance-critical code to enable efficient training at scale.</p></li><li><p>Improve our data ingestion and processing pipelines and help curate state-of-the-art datasets.</p></li><li><p>Set up systems to ensure our codebases are maintainable.</p></li><li><p>Collaborate with our Product team to bring AI research innovations into real-world applications.</p></li><li><p>Contribute to papers and technical reports and help present them at top international AI conferences.</p></li><li><p>Mentor engineers and researchers in your areas of software engineering expertise.</p></li><li><p>Engage in our hiring process to identify talented engineers to join our team.</p></li><li><p>Co-own efforts to make code, data and model artefacts available to the broader research community.</p><p></p></li></ul><h2><strong>Your profile</strong></h2><p>In Aleph Alpha Research, we hire slowly and deliberately. We recognise that we need top talent to deliver top research, and we value ability over experience: if you think you would be a good fit for this role, we’d encourage you to apply even if you do not meet all of the following qualifications.</p><p></p><p><strong>Basic Qualifications</strong></p><ul><li><p>Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field.</p></li><li><p>Willing to relocate to Germany. Our primary working locations are Heidelberg (preferred) and Berlin, although there is some flexibility to work from other locations in Germany, with travel to Heidelberg expected regularly, potentially weekly.</p></li><li><p>Proficiency in programming and a passion for crafting high-quality, maintainable software while following engineering best-practices (e.g., TDD, DDD).</p></li><li><p>Curiosity to dig deep and understand how things work.</p></li><li><p>Desire to take ownership of problems and collaborate with other teams to solve them.</p></li><li><p>Motivation to learn AI-related topics and get up-to-speed with the cutting edge.</p></li><li><p>Strong communication skills, with the ability to convey technical solutions to diverse audiences.</p></li></ul><p><strong>Preferred Qualifications</strong></p><ul><li><p>Master’s degree in computer science or related fields.</p></li><li><p>Familiarity with systems programming and low-level languages such as Rust, with a focus on performance and reliability.</p></li><li><p>Experience building software with a focus on performance and reliability.</p></li><li><p>Experience working with distributed systems.</p></li></ul><p></p><p>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:</p><ul><li><p>Experience bringing AI research innovations into production.</p></li><li><p>Experience in areas such as large-scale data processing or distributed computation for foundation model training or inference.</p></li><li><p>Familiarity with popular NLP tools and frameworks such as PyTorch or HF Transformers, with knowledge of transformer arch