Senior NLP / ML Researcher (LLM Evaluation & Agentic Systems)

Why Iris.ai

At Iris.ai, we’re building an agentic AI platform that scales expert-level domain knowledge across entire organizations.

For more than a decade, we’ve worked at the intersection of scientific research, industrial data, and applied AI, helping researchers, engineers, and business teams reason over complex technical knowledge.

Our products - Neuralith, Axion, and RSpace - span the full GenAI lifecycle:

• Data ingestion across text, tables, figures, and technical formats

• Advanced RAG and indexing pipelines

• Agentic orchestration and reasoning

• Rigorous LLM evaluation and governance

What makes us different: we care deeply about accuracy, evaluation, and responsibility. We don’t optimize for demos and proof-of-concepts we optimize for systems that experts trust and use.

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior NLP / ML Researcher who wants to work on hard, unsolved problems in modern language models — and see their ideas land in real products used by enterprises and researchers.

This role combines research and applied engineering. You’ll drive novel research directions, build prototypes, conduct experimentation, and help turn them into production capabilities inside our platform.

You’ll also play a key role in securing research funding by contributing to high-quality grant proposals both EU and national grants (EIC, Horizon, etc.).

If you enjoy thinking deeply about why models fail, how to measure intelligence and uncertainty, and when agents should reason vs. act — you’ll feel at home here.

What You’ll Research:

You’ll work on a focused set of high‑impact research directions that sit at the core of modern applied NLP and agentic AI. The exact mix will evolve based on your strengths and interests, but broadly includes:

• LLM evaluation & uncertainty — confidence estimation, answer relevance, and robustness in open‑book QA and RAG systems

• Agentic reasoning & control — understanding when models should reason, stop reasoning, or act, including inference‑time steering

• Translation & multilingual NLP — evaluation and system design for modern LLM‑based translation, including low‑resource languages

Your goal will be turning rigorous research into capabilities that real users can trust and use.

What You’ll Do

• Design and implement novel NLP & ML methods (from theory to code)

• Run end‑to‑end experiments: data, training, evaluation, ablations

• Translate research insights into prototypes and production features

• Collaborate closely with engineers and product teams

• Publish, present, and engage with the AI research community

• Lead and co‑author EU and national research grant proposals

• Write and publish research articles

Our Tech Stack

• Languages: Python (strong OOP practices)

• ML: PyTorch, Transformers, TensorFlow

• LLMs: Hugging Face, OpenAI, custom and fine‑tuned models

• Systems: RAG pipelines, Multi-agent frameworks, Evaluation tools

• Infra: AWS, Docker, Distributed computing

• Practices: Git, CI/CD, reproducible research workflows

What We’re Looking For

• PhD in ML, NLP, Computer Science, or a related field

• Strong, hands‑on experience with R&D grants and proposal writing (e.g. Horizon Europe, EIC, national or international research funding)

• 5+ years of industry or applied res