Context And Mission

The Natural Language Processing for Biomedical Information Analysis (NLP4BIA) group at BSC is an internationally renowned research group working on the development of NLP, language technology, and text-mining solutions applied primarily to biomedical and clinical data. It is a highly interdisciplinary team, funded through competitive European and National projects requiring the implementation of natural language processing and advanced AI solutions making use of diverse technologies, including Transformers and recent advances in Large Language Models (LLM) to improve healthcare data analysis.
The NLP4BIA-BSC is looking for a Research Engineer with experience in Language Technologies and Deep Learning. The candidate will be involved in technical work related to international projects, being part of a team of researchers working on topics related to multilingual information extraction in the clinical field, including Named-Entity Recognition, Entity Linking and Language Modeling. The candidate will have the opportunity to advance the state of the art of cross-lingual biomedical NLP methods by working in a multidisciplinary environment alongside linguists, medical experts, and other engineers.

Key Duties

NLP model development: Development of multilingual information extraction models in the biomedical field, including mention extraction and linking of terms to controlled terminologies. Pre-training of cross-lingual large language models for healthcare.
Technical project coordination: Coordinate technical contributions from different partners in technological projects.
Documentation and Reporting: Create technical reports and project documentation in both English and Spanish
Scientific writing: Collaborate in drafting technical research proposals and writing scientific papers.


Requirements

Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or a related field. Candidates with a minimum of a master's degree will be considered.
Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
Demonstrated experience in Natural Language Processing technologies (publication track record or projects in the field of Deep Learning/NLP)
Ability to design, implement, and evaluate existing NLP models.
Solid knowledge of information extraction techniques, including Named Entity Recognition (NER) or Entity Linking.
Experience in developing and training models using transformer architectures.
Practical experience with deep learning libraries (e.g. Pytorch, TensorFlow, Spacy, Transformers…)
Knowledge of deep learning methods for pre-training large language models using transformer architectures (like BERT, RoBERTA, DeBERTA, GPT, Bloom), as well as learning to implement LLMs.
Knowledge of deep learning methods for fine-tuning large language models, including contrastive learning, siamese networks, etc.
Advanced programming skills in Python.
Experience in software development resources (Git)
Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
Knowledge of and preferably hands-on experience with natural language technologies such as Named- Entity Recognition, Entity Linking, Semantic Text Similarity, and Machine Translation.
Basic knowledge of Spanish.
Competences
Excellent communication and presentation skills.
Strong technical writing skills.
In terms of personality, we are looking for someone who enjoys working in a wide range of areas and adapts quickly to new situations.
A proactive mindset, with creativity to design new solutions.
Ability to work effectively both autonomously and as part of an interdisciplinary team.
Comfortable working under pressure and meeting strict deadlines.
Proactive working style.


Conditions

The position will be located at BSC within the Life Sciences Department
We offer a full-time contract (37.5h/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: 23 paid vacation days plus 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