Senior NLP Data Scientist (W/M)
About the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC)
The Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) is a strategic focus area of the ETH domain, with EPFL and ETH Zurich as founding partners, developing into a National Research Infrastructure in 2025. Its mission 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. With a large multidisciplinary team of professionals across three locations (Lausanne, Zurich, Villigen), the SDSC provides expertise and services to various domains, such as health and biomedical sciences, energy and sustainability, climate and environment, and large-scale scientific infrastructures. More: www.datascience.ch
The Research team is responsible for research collaborations in the academic and public sector. See https://datascience.ch/academic-projects/ for an idea of some of our academic research collaborations.
Mission
As a Senior Data Scientist with expertise in NLP working in the Research team of the Swiss Data Science Center, you will help researchers and other collaborators in academia or the public sector in Switzerland to leverage state-of-the-art NLP models. In particular, you will assist collaborators from various fields in carrying 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 exchanging actively 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, implement the corresponding algorithms, perform evaluation together with collaborators, and release open-source code and write research papers when appropriate.
Main duties and responsibilities include
• Working on projects in NLP with collaborators from the academic and public sector.
You will also contribute to
• Advising MSc Students.
• Evaluating project proposals
Profile
The ideal candidate holds a PhD in NLP with experience in large language models and/or other foundation models. Of particular relevance are experience in training or fine-tuning (language) models of different sizes, familiarity with the characteristics of main language models and their applicability domains, experience with large-scale data projects. For large language models, beyond prompt engineering techniques, familiarity with fine-tuning and transfer methodologies would be of particular interest.
We expect the candidate to be typically proficient in Python, PyTorch, and familiar with Huggingface transformers, NLTK, etc.
We offer
• A stimulating, cross-disciplinary environment
• Opportunities for turning research into impactful solutions
• Excellent ties to research groups worldwide
Informations
Contract Start Date : 01/04/2025
Activity Rate : 100.00
Contract Type: CDD
Duration: 1 year renewable
Reference: 1453
Contact
Please contact Mathieu Salzmann (mathieu.salzmann@epfl.ch) or Guillaume Obozinski (guillaume.obozinski@sdsc.ethz.ch) for questions about the position (no applications).
Remark:
Only candidates who applied through the EPFL website will be considered. Files sent by agencies without a mandate will not be considered.