This position is at Barcelona Supercomputing Center The selection process will be entirely managed by Barcelona Supercomputing Center. 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 particularly in deep learning, large language model development, instruction tuning and agentic workflows, as well as related areas of Natural Language and Speech Processing.

The successful candidate will work in a highly sophisticated HPC environment, access state‑of‑the‑art computational infrastructure, and collaborate with leading experts both locally and internationally.

The researcher will be responsible for designing and implementing innovative techniques for language modeling, evaluation and system adaptation tailored to high-performance computing systems.

Key Duties

Lead the design and implementation of agentic workflows focusing on multi-step reasoning, tool-use and autonomous decision‑making.

Architect the integration of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Function Calling capabilities into the group's core language models.

Supervise the development of robust agent evaluation frameworks to measure reliability, safety and tool-interaction accuracy.

Collaborate with the infrastructure team to ensure scalable deployment of agentic systems in high-performance computing environments.

Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior and intermediate researchers by defining the roadmap for the agentic capabilities of the models.

Contribute to the scientific community through high‑quality publications in top‑tier conferences like NeurIPS, ICLR or ACL and Open Source contributions.

Requirements

Education PhD or Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence or a related field.

Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience Proven track record in developing LLM-based agents, function calling systems or complex AI pipelines.

Expert knowledge of Python and Deep Learning frameworks like PyTorch or JAX.

Deep understanding of Transformer architectures and recent advances in Agentic AI such as MCP, ReAct or AutoGPT-style patterns.

Hands‑on experience with modern post‑training frameworks including TRL, FastChat, slime or NeMo‑RL.

Experience with distributed training and large‑scale model deployment.

Excellent level of written and spoken English.

Strong track record of high‑quality publications in top‑tier conferences like NeurIPS, ICLR or ACL.

Significant contributions to Open Source projects in the field of LLMs or agents.

Fluency in Spanish is highly valued.

Knowledge of Spain's co‑official languages, such as Catalan, Basque or Galician is a significant advantage.

Competences

Strong leadership and mentorship abilities to guide and support junior researchers.

Excellent communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences.

Project management skills with the ability to define and execute research roadmaps.

Proactive attitude and ability to work in a high-performance computing environment.

Conditions

The position will be located at BSC within the Directors Department.

We offer a full‑time contract (35h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state‑of‑the‑art infrastructure, adaptable 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: 22 days of holidays + 6 personal days + 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement.

Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona.

Starting date: ASAP.

Selection Process

The recruitment process consists of two phases: Curriculum Analysis: Evaluation of previous experience and/or scientific history, degree, training, and other professional information relevant to the position. 40 points Interview phase: The highest-rated candidates at the curriculum level will be invited to the interview phase, conducted by the corresponding department and Human Resources. 60 points.

A minimum of 30 points out of 60 must be obtained to be eligible for the position.

The recruitment panel will be composed of at least three people, ensuring at least 25% representation of women.

In accordance with OTM-R principles, a gender-balanced recruitment panel is formed for each vacancy at the beginning of the process.

After reviewing the content of the applications, the panel will begin the interviews, with at least one technical and one administrative interview.

At a minimum, a personality questionnaire as well as a technical exercise will be conducted during the process.

The panel will make a final decision, and all individuals who participated in the interview phase will receive feedback with details on the acceptance or rejection of their profile.

Equality, Diversity & Inclusion

BSC-CNS is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion.

We are pleased to 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 state or local law.

OTM-R principles for selection processes BSC-CNS is committed to the principles of the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers of the European Commission and the Open, Transparent and Merit-based Recruitment principles (OTM-R). This is applied for any potential candidate in all our processes, for example by creating gender-balanced recruitment panels and recognizing career breaks etc.

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