Context And Mission

The 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 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 Duties

- Lead 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 MCP) and information extraction, prioritising BSC open models (Salamandra/ALIA) where suitable.
- Deploy and serve models with efficient inference stacks vLLM, OpenAI-compatible endpoints), from HPC to workstation-class platforms, benchmarking quality, latency and cost to inform partners’ decisions.
- Plan,



design and implement the evaluation of models, platforms and applications (including performance in Catalan and Spanish, safety and guardrails) to assess solution capabilities and determine the most relevant development options to deliver impactful outcomes.
- Contribute to the assessment of the regulatory and ethical aspects of proposed solutions (EU AI Act, data protection, technological sovereignty) and to the application of BSC AI model development guidelines.
- Write technical deliverables, reports and documentation in English (and in Spanish or Catalan when required by partners), in close collaboration with software developers and project managers, and keep track of the effort and services delivered.
- Monitor and evaluate feedback from users and partners, identify improvement actions, and feed lessons learned back into the group’s reusable tools, templates and best practices.
- Contribute to the preparation of competitive proposals (European, national and regional calls) and to business development activities together with BSC’s innovation and business development teams.
- Mentor junior engineers and students, and coordinate small technical teams within specific collaborations.
- Create and deliver talks, training sessions and workshops about AI and its applications, in top-tier technical forums, for BSC Connects and AI Factory participants, and in dissemination settings for non-specialist audiences.

Requirements

- Education
- PhD degree in computer science, software engineering, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics/linguistics or equivalent

- Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience

- Experience in project management related tasks: scoping, task planning and tracking, time management, effort reporting and deliverable writing.
- Experience working with external stakeholders (companies, public administrations, technology

📌 Senior Research Engineer (Barcelona)
🏢 Barcelona Supercomputing Center
📍 Barcelona