Applied Research Scientist at Alinia AI in Barcelona, Catalonia, ES

Alinia’s Mission

At Alinia, we enable the safe deployment of (generative) AI business-critical operations in industries that rely on policy and value alignment and trust. We make safe LLM deployment more accessible and effective for companies of all sizes.

Your part (why does this role exist?)

Developing a robust and holistic alignment strategy and platform that combines state-of-the-art evaluation and optimization techniques, Responsible AI best practices and the realities of running a business is a complex task with applied research at the center.

As an Applied Researcher at Alinia, you will research, develop, and improve methods for the automated evaluation and postraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) as guardrails. This will shape the art of the possible for our customers and their clients.

Role Overview and Role Responsibilities

At Alinia, our Applied Research Scientists play a pivotal role in creating the AI intellectual property and technologies that drive the development of Alinia's Alignment Platform. This role demands a profound understanding of LLMs, their evaluation, and effective alignment with a given set of values and policies. Applied Research Scientists are action-oriented and hands-on, tasked with developing practical AI tools that solve the main challenges our customers encounter with the safe and responsible deployment of LLM applications and that can be seamlessly integrated into our Platform. This role is designed for those ready to apply their expertise actively and decisively within a dynamic development environment.

Responsibilities

• Innovate and refine evaluation methods that assess LLMs along multiple alignment dimensions.
• Create robust techniques for synthetic data augmentation to enhance the assessment of LLMs.
• Develop streamlined approaches for aligning LLMs through supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization.
• Document research projects, progress, and experimentation results and share findings with the broader team.
• Work closely with the product development team to transform research insights into actionable AI solutions and strategies for the Alinia Platform.
• Keep up-to-date with the latest trends and developments in LLM evaluation, alignment, optimization, and related technologies.

Skills and Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• MSc in Computer Science, AI, Linguistics, or a related field.
• Proven experience in LLMs, ML, or NLP.
• Demonstrated research capability with publications in reputable AI, ethics, or machine learning conferences and journals.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Experience with ML frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or JAX.
• Demonstrated knowledge and practical experience in LLM training (Please note: this is a strict requirement for the position).

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, Linguistics, or a related field.
• Contributions to open-source projects or public datasets in the field of AI.
• First-author publications at peer-reviewed AI conferences.
• Experience with synthetic data generation, LLM as a judge frameworks, LLM post-training.

Why Join Alinia?

• Cutting-edge tech: Work on one of the most important challenges in AI—alignment, safety, and trust
• High ownership & growth: Be a core part of the early engineering team with massive upside
• Flexible work: Hybrid or remote work, with preference for CET time zone
• Collaborative culture: Small, experienced, mission-driven team
• Impact: Directly shape the technical foundation of an AI governance platform adopted by enterprises