Doctoral Researcher – Natural Language Processing (m/f/d)

Role Overview

FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg is looking for a doctoral researcher to join its Natural Language Processing work. The role gives a fair amount of research independence while focusing on advancing large language and vision-language models for the long tail of real-world data: tasks, domains, and languages that are uncommon or previously unseen. The research direction centers on developing new machine learning, NLP, and reinforcement learning approaches.

Research Focus

The core themes for this position are reasoning, interpretability, neuro-symbolic approaches, and memory. The selected researcher will be expected to carry out high-quality research and target publication in leading conferences.

Additional Academic Duties

Beyond research, the role includes contributing to teaching activities in the lab, supporting and supervising students, and taking on other organizational responsibilities when required. Attendance at conferences for presentation and dissemination of results is also part of the position.

Candidate Profile

The ideal applicant has a strong foundation in natural language processing and machine learning, solid programming ability, and very good English skills. The person should be capable of working both independently and in an interdisciplinary team, and should bring a positive mindset, curiosity for research, and enthusiasm for developing new solutions.

Required Qualifications

• A Master of Science in computer science, computational linguistics, or a closely related discipline is required before the PhD start date.
• A Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field is also required.
• Applicants should have strong academic preparation in NLP and machine learning.
• Advanced programming skills are expected.
• Fluency or high proficiency in English is necessary.

Benefits and Working Environment

• Progression to the next salary level and pay increases according to the German public-service collective agreement for the federal states (TV-L) or the Bavarian Public Servants Remuneration Act (BayBesG), plus an extra annual bonus.
• 30 days of annual leave based on a five-day work week, along with additional days off on December 24 and 31.
• Occupational pension coverage and a savings scheme for asset accumulation.
• Strong support throughout the academic qualification phase.
• Access to structured doctoral programmes.
• Career development support in cooperation with the Graduate Center.
• Comprehensive onboarding with support from a dedicated team.
• Team-building and joint group activities.
• Subsidized food and beverages in the student restaurants.
• A workplace located within easy walking distance of public transport.
• Family-friendly conditions, including childcare support during school holidays.
• Flexible working hours.
• Broad access to training and professional development opportunities.
• Active health management initiatives.
• Opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration across computer science and related areas such as speech processing, security, reliable systems, humanities, linguistics, digitally supported humanities research, and medicine.
• Access to powerful, well-maintained GPU clusters through the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg HPC Center.

Working Conditions

The position is based in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany and is intended for on-site work.