Job Title Junior researcher in AI for the cognitive domain (RE1)

Closing Date Saturday, 25 July, 2026

About BSC The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) is a leading supercomputing center in Spain, hosting MareNostrum, and is a founding and hosting member of the former European HPC infrastructure PRACE. It researches, develops, and manages information technologies to facilitate scientific progress, combining HPC service provision and R&D; in computer and computational science with over 1000 staff from 60 countries.

Key Duties

Support research on AI, particularly LLM-based methods, for cognitive-domain tasks, including information understanding, semantic analysis, knowledge extraction, reasoning and decision support.

Design and evaluate methods to adapt and augment foundation models, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic workflows.

Investigate the robustness, reliability and security of LLMs and other multimodal models under noisy, manipulated or adversarial inputs (hallucinations, prompt injection, jailbreak-related behaviours).

Develop experimental prototypes, datasets and benchmarks, and conduct reproducible experiments using BSC computing and HPC infrastructure.

Contribute to scientific publications, project deliverables and collaborate with academic and industrial partners.

Requirements

Education

Bachelor of Science or equivalent degree in data science, computer science, AI or applied mathematics and computation.

Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience

Academic background in ML and AI, including supervised and unsupervised learning (neural network regressors, classifiers, encoders).

Solid mathematical foundations in statistics, optimisation and linear algebra.

Programming skills in scientific Python and practical experience with data analysis, machine learning experimentation and scientific computing workflows.

Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience

Experience with NLP, text classification, information extraction or other language-related machine learning tasks.





Knowledge or hands‑on experience with transformer-based models, attention mechanisms, prompt engineering, and fine‑tuning techniques such as RAGs or LoRA.

Interest or experience in model robustness, adversarial machine learning, AI safety or cyber‑security evaluation.

Participation in academic or applied research projects and experience communicating scientific work through reports, posters, presentations or publications.

Knowledge of C/C++, Julia, Git, Linux environments, HPC or distributed computing.

Excellent communication in English.

Competences

Interest in foundation models and LLMs, with a clear motivation to develop a scientific research engineer career in emerging AI technologies.

Ability to formulate research questions, design experiments and critically analyse quantitative and qualitative results.

Proactive, rigorous and organised approach to work, with good planning and problem‑solving skills.

Capacity to work under scientific supervision and progressively develop autonomy in the definition and execution of research activities.

Team player and goal‑oriented, with interest in collaborating with industrial and academic partners on challenging problems.

Strong analytical background, critical thinking and capacity for innovation.

Conditions The position will be located at BSC within the CASE Department.

Full‑time contract (35 h/week) with adaptable working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance and support for relocation procedures.

Open‑ended contract duration linked to project and budget duration.

Holidays: 22 days + 6 personal days + 24th and 31st of December.

Salary: competitive, commensurate with qualifications and experience, according to the cost of living in Barcelona.

Starting date: 01/09/2026.

EEO Statement BSC-CNS is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion. We consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or any other basis protected by applicable law.

📌 Junior researcher in AI for the cognitive domain (Madrid)
🏢 Barcelona Supercomputing Center
📍 Madrid