Your Role & Our Team
IRB Barcelona is launching a new Artificial Intelligence group and is looking for AI Officer to help build it. The group’s mission is not to train frontier models, but to make them genuinely useful for science: turning powerful AI models and the institute’s data into reliable, reusable systems that accelerate biomedical discovery.
The successful candidate will design, build and maintain standardised AI ecosystems — what we call a “harness” — around large language models and other AI models: the interfaces, knowledge and retrieval layers, tools and connectors, reusable workflows, evaluation and safeguards that let research groups apply frontier AI in a rigorous, reproducible way. Positions are embedded with research groups and core facilities, so the work has direct, visible impact on ongoing science.
We are looking for people with a solid software and engineering foundation and a deep interest in AI architecture. The emphasis of the role is on building and integrating systems; a smaller part involves selecting, adapting,



fine-tuning and evaluating existing open or commercial models — not developing new model architectures. Previous experience deploying AI in production is an advantage, but it is not essential.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Design, build and maintain the “harness” around AI models: agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tools, APIs, connectors and interoperability protocols (e.g. MCP), reusable skills and workflows.
Connect research groups’ data, databases and literature to models through RAG and knowledge/graph layers, so answers are grounded in verifiable, institutional evidence.
Select, adapt, fine-tune and evaluate existing models (open-source and commercial), rather than training new architectures from scratch.
Build evaluation harnesses — benchmarks, metrics, human-in-the-loop review and guardrails — so nothing is deployed without measurement and oversight.
Deploy and operate AI models, agent environments and tool integration

📌 AI Officer (Barcelona)
🏢 Irb Barcelona
📍 Barcelona