Research Assistant

Full time: 35 hours per week

Fixed term: until 31^st August 2025

The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh invites applications for a Research Assistant position in natural language processing. The researchers will join a team working on efficient, large-scale multilingual data extraction and model-building.

The Opportunity:

The candidate will work within the Machine Translation group (www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/statmt), which is well known for developing open-source tools and data, running the WMT shared tasks, and has also had a leading role in the field of neural machine translation. It is a supportive group which has many alumni who have moved on to interesting positions in research and industry. We also have access to large GPU clusters and to a regular programme of seminars and workshops with internationally recognised experts. The MT group is within the Institute for Language, Cognition and Communication (web.inf.ed.ac.uk/ilcc/about-us) one of the largest research institutes in Europe in this field.

We are recruiting for a Horizon Europe project, High Performance Language Technologies – HPLT. This project is creating an open platform that trains reproducible high-quality machine translation systems and language models. We are gathering over a million GPU hours and 7 petabytes of data. Research in HPLT focuses on efficiency and models that apply to a wide range of languages.

The successful candidates will be responsible for a programme which includes fundamental research into deep learning models. This is an exciting opportunity to work on internationally visible projects, collaborating with strong teams of academic and industrial partners.

This post is advertised as full-time however, we are open to considering part-time or flexible working patterns. We are also open to considering requests for hybrid working (on a non-contractual basis) that combines a mix of remote and regular on-campus working. The post is fixed term until 31^st August 2025.

The salary for this post is UE06 £33,882 to £39,105 per annum.

Your skills and attributes for success:

Essential

• An MSc (or equivalent) in a computer science, artificial intelligence, or a related discipline
• Background in machine learning and natural language processing
• Strong programming skills, ideally including C++ or Python          

Desirable

• Relevant research experience: machine translation, efficient and very large-scale NLP, dialogue processing
• Experience with the deep learning toolkits
• Scientific publications

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