Senior data science expert (f/m/d)

The Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) is a national research infrastructure in data science and artificial intelligence (AI) within the ETH domain, with EPFL and ETH Zurich as founding partners. Its mandate is to support academic labs, hospitals, industry and public sector stakeholders, including cantonal and federal administrations, through their entire data science journey, from the collection and management of data to machine learning, AI, and industrialization. The Research team at the SDSC comprises more than 35 data scientists, seeking to apply novel AI/ML methods to solve real-world problems in the academic and public sectors. Project background As a Senior Data Scientist with expertise in NLP and LLMs working in the Research team, you will help researchers and other collaborators in academia or the public sector in Switzerland leverage state-of-the-art methodologies. You will help collaborators from various fields carry out projects based on textual or related data (potentially multi-modal), and notably in health and biomedical sciences, climate and environment, energy and sustainability, and social sciences. This typically involves actively exchanging with collaborators and domain experts to understand the precise desiderata of the project, determining which approaches, formulations, and language models are most effective to achieve the desired goals, implementing the corresponding algorithms, performing the evaluations hand-in-hand with collaborators, and eventually releasing open-source code and writing research papers when appropriate. Working on projects requiring expertise with LLM-based and NLP methods with collaborators from the academic and public sectors. Prepare scientific publications for top-tier machine learning and domain conferences and journals. Evaluating project proposals. The ideal candidate holds a PhD in NLP and has experience with large language models and/or other foundation models. In particular, relevant experience includes training or fine-tuning (language) models of different sizes, familiarity with the characteristics of main language models and their domain applicability, and experience with large-scale data projects. We expect the candidate to be proficient in Python and PyTorch, and familiar with Hugging Face Transformers, NLTK, LLM environments, tools for agentic AI, etc. We value profiles with proven experience in interdisciplinary projects and environments in which developments are guided by domain research questions. Opportunities to publish contributions to research projects in high-impact journals ETH Zurich is one of the world’s leading universities specialising in science and technology. We are renowned for our excellent education, cutting-edge fundamental research and direct transfer of new knowledge into society. Other relevant documents: electronic copies of diplomas, transcripts, certificates, links to code repositories, and/or a portfolio of projects Further information about the Swiss Data Science Center can be found on our website . Examples of projects carried out by the Research team can be found here .