Senior NLP Data Scientist / Senior NLP Data Scientistess

Join Our Team at the Swiss Data Science Center

The Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) is a national research infrastructure dedicated to advancing data science and artificial intelligence (AI) within the ETH domain, with EPFL and ETH Zurich as founding partners. Our mission is to support academic labs, hospitals, industry, and public sector stakeholders, including cantonal and federal administrations, throughout their data science journey—from data collection and management to machine learning, AI, and industrialization. With a multidisciplinary team of professionals located in Lausanne, Zurich, and Villigen, the SDSC offers expertise and services across various domains, including health and biomedical sciences, energy and sustainability, climate and environment, and large-scale scientific infrastructure.

About the Position

As a Senior Data Scientist specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs), you will be integrated into our dynamic Research team, which comprises over 35 data scientists focused on solving real-world challenges in academic and public sectors through state-of-the-art methodologies. You will work closely with researchers and collaborators from different fields, driving projects that involve textual or related data, particularly in health and biomedical sciences, environmental science, energy, and social sciences.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with domain experts to define project objectives and methodologies.
• Identify effective approaches and language models tailored to the project goals.
• Implement and evaluate algorithms in collaboration with partners.
• Release open-source code and contribute to research publications when appropriate.
• Supervise and collaborate with students, offering mentorship and guidance.
• Engage with diverse stakeholders, including researchers and professionals from various domains.
• Prepare scientific publications for leading machine learning and domain conferences and journals.
• Evaluate project proposals and contribute to project planning.

Qualifications

The ideal candidate will hold a PhD in NLP and possess experience with large language models and/or other foundation models. Relevant experience includes:

• Training or fine-tuning language models of varying sizes.
• Familiarity with the characteristics of main language models and their domain applicability.
• Experience in large-scale data projects.
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch, with familiarity in utilizing Hugging Face Transformers, NLTK, and tools for agentic AI.
• A record of research excellence demonstrated through publications in relevant venues.

We value interdisciplinary project experience and seek candidates with a strong curiosity for learning from non-technical fields. Proficiency in effectively communicating complex methodologies and results to non-technical audiences is also essential.

Why Join Us?

• Engage in a stimulating, cross-disciplinary environment that fosters personal and professional growth.
• Opportunities to apply cutting-edge methods to develop impactful solutions.
• Budget support for travel and conference participation.

Are you interested in creating tools that promote and universalize the use of modern ML methodologies? We invite you to be part of our innovative team!

How to Apply

Apply online using the form below. Only applications matching the job profile will be considered.

About Us

For more information about the Swiss Data Science Center and an overview of projects carried out by our Research team, please visit our website. For inquiries regarding the position, please contact luis.salamanca@sdsc.ethz.ch (no applications).

Please note that we exclusively accept applications submitted through our online application portal. Applications via email or postal services will not be considered.

We wish to emphasize that pre-selection is conducted by our responsible recruiters, not artificial intelligence.