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 growing our academic partnerships and our GenAI group of PhD students. We are looking for an enthusiastic researcher at heart, passionate to improve foundational, multi-modal NLP models, and aiming to obtain a PhD degree in a three-year program.

As a PhD student in Aleph Alpha Research, you develop new approaches to improve the state-of-the-art model architecture and applications. You are given a unique research environment with sufficient amount of compute and industrial, as well as academic professional supervisors to conduct and publish your research.

Ideally you sketch your dream research topic in your application letter that is aligned to fit one of the following two research teams:

In our Foundational Models team, you create powerful state-of-the art, multi-modal, foundational models, research and share novel approaches to pre-training, fine-tuning, and helpfulness, and enable cost-efficient inference on a variety of accelerators.
In our Explainability team, you contribute to understand the fundamentals of state-of-the-art GenAI Models. Our mission is to ensure that these models are not only powerful and efficient but also transparent and trustworthy for users, developers, and stakeholders.

Your responsibilities:

• Research and development of novel approaches and algorithms that improve training, inference, interpretations or applications of foundational models

• Analysis and benchmarking of state-of-the art as well as new approaches

• Collaborating with scientists and engineers at Aleph Alpha and Aleph Alpha Research, plus chosen external industrial and academic partners

• In particular, fruitful interactions with our group of GenAI PhD students and fostering exchange between Aleph Alpha Research and your university

• Publishing own and collaborative work on machine learning venues, and making code and models source-available for use by the broader research community

Your profile:

• Masters Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or similar

• Solid understanding of DL/ML techniques, algorithms, and tools, for training and inference

• Experience and knowledge of Python and at least one common deep-learning framework, preferably PyTorch

• Ready to relocate to region Heidelberg, Germany

• Interest in bridging the gap between addressing practical industry challenges and contributing to academic research

• Ambition to obtain a PhD in generative machine learning, in a three-year program

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 and attractive compensation package

• An inspiring working environment with short lines of communication, horizontal organization, and great team spirit