[Apologies for Cross-Posting]

The Data Science Department at EURECOM, Sophia-Antipolis France, invites applications for a Research Engineer position. The candidate will work as part of a department-wide project, which aims at developing our research activities on large language models (LLMs).

We are looking for fresh, ambitious and hard-working software engineers with a clear passion for turning ideas in the field of machine learning into fully-functional prototypes, demonstrators, and systems, using cutting edge machine learning libraries, and computing facilities.

The position is funded by a French National project on Artificial Intelligence, and targets the development of LLMs in several flavors. Our first goal is to target an audience of EURECOM staff, including researchers and administration, to offer novel conversational agents that can use internal, multimodal information to interact with users for Q&A, summarization, in-filling and many other tasks. A second ambitious goal is to offer innovative educational services to EURECOM students, by designing novel conversational agents instructed to follow Socratic interactions. Such conversational agents will be augmented with teaching material (lecture notes, slides, video lectures, code from labs, etc…) which should be used and referenced in conversations.

The successful candidate will work in close relation with professors, postdoctoral researchers and Ph.D. candidates, and will lead contributions to: (i) the implementation and deployment of state-of-the art, open-source LLMs, including inner components (novel attention mechanisms, novel tokenization schemes, key-value caching, to name a few) and outer components (such as retrieval augmented generation) (ii) the definition of appropriate methodologies for training and, most importantly, fine-tuning of our internal LLMs, (iii) the definition of appropriate benchmarks and validation methodologies, and (iv) communication to a public of developers, engineers and practitioners through technical blogs, online demonstrators (e.g. HuggingFace spaces, on-site deployment) of our results, as well as to demonstrate the various releases of the prototype to EURECOM management teams.

Since our activities are fueled by an important public fund, in the context of the French Government plan for AI, called the 3IA, the successful candidate will also participate to project meetings and reviews, as well as public demonstrations of research results.

Requirements: * Education Level / Degree: Ms.c. or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a closely related area with a strong background on algorithmic development and software engineering * Applicants should have a good background on machine learning, a taste for learning new topics related to machine learning research, as well as proven experience in the design of solid software engineering artifacts * Applicants should have strong communication skills, with target audiences ranging from the scientific and academic community, as well as engineers and product managers * The working language in the department is English.

Application The application must include: * Detailed curriculum, including (if available) a list of software engineering projects, public demonstrators, and contributions to open-source projects * a cover letter describing the applicant’s interests the contact details of 2/3 persons that can provide references about the candidate * the transcripts of courses taken at graduate (and optionally undergraduate) level

Applications should be submitted by e-mail to Pietro.Michiardi@eurecom.fr and secretariat@eurecom.fr with the reference : DS/PM/EFELIA-LLM/102023

Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.

Start date: ASAP