Early-stage AI startup · Series Seed (€8M raised) · First AI research hire in Barcelona The company

We're hiring for a fast-growing European AI startup that helps small and mid-sized companies find, prepare and win public tenders a huge, opaque market where most companies bid blind, burn weeks of administrative work, and lose.

Founded in 2025, they've raised €8M, reached product-market fit in their home market with 120+ customers, and are now opening their international hub in Barcelona to expand across Europe. The team is small, technical and unusually strong: engineers from top European technical universities, founders who still write code.

The role

This is the first AI research hire in Barcelona.

- Design and evaluate retrieval and ranking systems over large, heterogeneous document corpora
- Build extraction and structuring pipelines for long, unstructured legal-administrative documents
- Own evaluation: define the benchmarks, measure what actually works, kill what doesn't
- Improve generation quality and grounding — accuracy matters more than fluency here
- Work multilingual from day one (Spanish, Italian, French, English)
- Move your own work into production alongside the engineering team

What you'll work on

- Inference efficiency and cost per token — model routing, context caching and deduplication, prompt compression, batching, distillation or fine-tuning smaller models on recurring cases




- Retrieval and context selection — sending three relevant pages instead of forty, without losing accuracy
- Evaluation — building the benchmarks that let the team know whether a change improved anything, across quality, latency and cost
- Document understanding — extraction and structuring over long, inconsistent, multilingual documents
- Grounding and factual accuracy — output a company will stake real money on

Who we're looking for

- Strong foundations in machine learning, NLP or information retrieval — MSc, PhD, research internships, or equivalent self-taught depth
- From a strong technical programme, or able to show equivalent work
- Hands-on with modern LLM systems: RAG, fine-tuning, evaluation frameworks
- Solid Python, and the instinct to profile and measure before optimising
- You reach for an experiment before you reach for an opinion
- Experience is not a requirement. Recent graduates are genuinely welcome — this team hires on technical depth and hunger, not years
- Fluent English

What's on offer

- Founding-team scope: you define how AI works in this company, not maintain someone else's stack
- Direct work with the technical co-founder
- Real research problems with real commercial stakes, and no layers between you and the decision
- Barcelona, on-site, international team
- Competitive salary + equity

Process

Apply here or reach out directly — happy to share the company name and full context in a first conversation.

📌 Artificial Intelligence Researcher (Barcelona)
🏢 Talent-R
📍 Barcelona