Postdoctoral Researcher in Multimodal Foundation Models for Earth System Modeling

**Job Reference**:

- 585_25_ES_CES_R2

**Position**:

- Postdoctoral Researcher in Multimodal Foundation Models for Earth System Modeling (R2)

**Closing Date**:

- Monday, 20 October, 2025

**Reference**: 585_25_ES_CES_R2

**Job title**: Postdoctoral Researcher in Multimodal Foundation Models for Earth System Modeling (R2)

**About BSC**
- The 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.

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**Context And Mission**
- We are seeking a talented and motivated Postdoctoral Researcher to join our team for the prestigious ELLIOT Horizon Europe project. ELLIOT is a landmark €25 million, four-year initiative with 30 partners across 12 countries, dedicated to advancing the next generation of multimodal generalist foundation models (MGFMs). This project will be instrumental in tackling complex challenges in Earth system modeling and environmental monitoring by leveraging Europe's leading High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures, including BSC's MareNostrum, LUMI, JUPITER, and Leonardo.

**Key Duties**
- Collaborate on the training and fine-tuning of large-scale multimodal foundation models for Earth system data.
- Create and implement adapters for foundation models to effectively process and understand diverse spatio-temporal environmental data streams.
- Develop energy
- and compute-efficient variants of foundation models suitable for deployment on HPC platforms.
- Contribute to the creation of open-source datasets, pipelines, and reproducible research tools for the scientific community.
- Collaborate with a multidisciplinary team of researchers at BSC and across the ELLIOT consortium.
- Publish research findings in top-tier scientific journals and conferences. Lead the development of the project and reporting responsibilities**Requirements**:

- Education
- A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Environmental Sciences, or a related field.
- Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Familiarity with foundation models, adaptation techniques, and fine-tuning (model development in PyTorch, multimodal data ingestion, HPC knowledge, etc.)
- Hands-on experience with deep learning models, particularly in the context of large-scale datasets.
- Experience working with environmental or Earth system data (satellite imagery, reanalysis data, etc.
- Ability to deliver and experience in reporting and management of EU projects.
- Excellent communication and teamwork skills, with a high level of proficiency in English.
- Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Experience with high-performance computing (HPC) environments and parallel programming (e.g., MPI, OpenMP).
- Experience with the management and analysis of large-scale geospatial and/or climate datasets (e.g., NetCDF, GRIB, Zarr).
- Knowledge of Earth system models and climate science.
- A strong track record of publications in relevant scientific venues.
- Competences
- Problem-solving, pro-active, result-oriented work attitude
- Capability to work in an international and fast-paced work
- Good communication skills
- Good written and verbal communication skills in English
- Ability to work in a professional environment within a multidisciplinary and international team

**Conditions**
- The position will be located at BSC within the Earth Sciences Department
- We offer a full-time contract (37.5h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance, support to the relocation procedures
- Duration: Open-ended contract due to technical and scientific activities linked to the project and budget duration
- Holidays: 23 paid vacation days plus 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement
- Starting date: As soon as possible

**Applications procedure and process**
- A full CV in English including contact details
- A cover/motivation letter with a statement of interest in English, clearly specifying for which specific