Senior Research Engineer

About BSCThe Barcelona Supercomputing Center
- Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the leading supercomputing center in Spain. It houses MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, was a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and is now hosting entity for EuroHPC JU, the Joint Undertaking that leads large-scale investments and HPC provision in Europe. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof, and currently has over 1000 staff from 60 countries.
Look At The BSC ExperienceBSC-CNS YouTube Channel Let's stay connected with BSC Folks We are particularly interested for this role in the strengths and lived experiences of women and underrepresented groups to help us avoid perpetuating biases and oversights in science and IT research. In instances of equal merit, the incorporation of the under-represented sex will be favoured. We promote Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, fostering an environment where each and every one of us is appreciated for who we are, regardless of our differences. If you consider that you do not meet all the requirements, we encourage you to continue applying for the job offer. We value diversity of experiences and skills, and you could bring unique perspectives to our team.
Context And MissionThe AI Institute at BSC has consolidated experience in several areas of language technology and generative AI, such as the development of large open language models (the Salamandra/ALIA family), machine translation and unsupervised learning for under-resourced languages and domains. It has been entrusted by the Spanish and the Catalan governments, through the ALIA and AINA initiatives, to develop fundamental open-source resources and technologies for Spanish, Catalan and the other co-official languages. Within the AI Institute, the Applied Intelligence group is the bridge between this research and its real-world use. The group works with public administrations, companies and research partners to turn BSC models and infrastructure into working solutions: it scopes use cases, builds pilots and proofs of concept (conversational and agentic assistants, retrieval‑augmented generation, information extraction, model evaluation) and advises external organisations on how to adopt open, sovereign and regulation-compliant AI. A growing part of this activity is channelled through BSC Connects, BSC’s public–private collaboration programme with companies, and through the BSC AI Factory, one of the EuroHPC AI Factories, which offers startups, SMEs, industry and public bodies access to MareNostrum 5 together with specialised R&D, consultancy and training services. We are looking for a Senior Research Engineer to act as technical lead in these collaborations: someone able to understand a partner’s problem, design and prototype an AI-based solution on BSC infrastructure, evaluate it rigorously, and communicate the results to both technical and non-technical audiences. This project is funded by the European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, in accordance with Council Regulation (EU) 2020/2094 of 14 December 2020, and regulated by Regulation (EU) 2021/241 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 February 2021, in the context of the “BSC AI Factory” project. This project has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101234399 and Spain, Portugal, Romania and Türkiye. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme. It is also co-funded by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service and counts with the support of the Government of Catalonia.
Key DutiesLead the technical scoping of collaborations with companies and public administrations, in particular within the BSC Connects programme and the BSC AI Factory: identifying challenges, assessing feasibility and data readiness, and translating partner requirements into proposals, work plans and technical specifications, working alongside project management.
Provide expert advice and hands‑on technical support to AI Factory users (startups, SMEs, industry and public sector) on model selection, adaptation (fine‑tuning, RAG, alignment), deployment and efficient use of MareNostrum 5 and other BSC AI infrastructures.
Design and develop pilots and proofs of concept based on large language models and other AI technologies, such as conversational and agentic assistants, retrieval‑augmented generation, function calling and tool use (e.
G. MCP) and information extraction, prioritising BSC open models (Salamandra/ALIA) where suitable.
Deploy and serve models with efficient inference stacks (e.
G. vLLM, llama.
Cpp, OpenAI‑compat