Context And Mission

The Speech Team at the newly established AI Institute hosted at BSC brings together extensive expertise in several areas, including automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speech LLMs, with a particular emphasis on low-resource languages and settings. In addition, the AI Institute has been entrusted by both the Spanish and Catalan governments with the mission of developing foundational open-source resources and technologies for Spanish and Catalan.
The Speech Team contributes to two flagship national initiatives: the AINA project, funded by the Catalan Ministry of Digital Policy and aimed at advancing AI resources for Catalan, and the ALIA project, funded by the Spanish Secretariat of Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence and aimed at AI resources for the co-oficial languages in Spain. The team also participates in a range of EU- and other nationally funded research projects.
The team is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer with experience in speech technologies, particularly in deep learning and model development for tasks such as speech recognition, speech synthesis, and LLMs. The successful candidate will join the Speech Team, work within a highly advanced HPC environment, gain access to state-of-the-art systems and computational infrastructure, and collaborate with experts across multiple disciplines at both local and international levels.


Key Duties

- Design and implement deep learning models for speech-related tasks.
- Prepare model training in HPC clusters.
- Ensure the quality of the training data and models.
- Document and publish data, code and models on open platforms.
- Supervise licensing and intellectual property of data and models in the speech team.
- Participate in the application for research projects and in the management of the ongoing ones.
- Write research papers and project deliverables.
- Mentor junior ML engineers.


Requirements

Education
- Master's Degree in Computer Science, Telecommunications, Computational Linguistics or related disciplines.

Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Demonstrated experience of at least 2 years in machine learning.
- Demonstrated experience of at least 2 years in deep learning frameworks and in the relevant area(s).
- Demonstrated experience in speech or audio processing.
- Native or good level of spoken and written English.
- Programming skills: Linux, Python, Deep learning libraries, git

Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
- Demonstrated experience in developing open-source software and resources.
- Demonstrated experience in working in dynamic ML team.
- Native or good level of spoken and written Catalan and/or Spanish.
- Strong understanding of linguistic concepts.

Competences
- Ability to work independently and in a team to complete tasks on schedule.
- Ability to work under set deadlines.


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, flexible 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