Data Science Expert

To support teaching, research and knowledge transfer, the IT Services of ETH Zurich are working as a service organization in a large and complex IT environment. Within the ITS section Scientific IT Services the group Computational & Data Science Support aims at bridging the gap between computational research and IT services and infrastructure provisioning. We are working closely together with ETH researchers to provide support in the wide area of scientific computing from data management and analysis, development of scientific software, to porting and optimizing such software to high-performance and cloud computing infrastructures.

We are looking for a Data Science Expert with a strong background in GenAI technologies to join ETH's Scientific IT Services. The primary focus will be on ETH's recent initiative to build a generic, scalable and extensible "AI platform" with services and functionalities for teaching, research and administration. Additionally, this role will encompass work on other ML and scientific computing projects, providing opportunities to support diverse research and computational needs across the institution.

Your primary focus will be on ETH's AI platform project, where you will gather requirements, conduct feasibility studies, and perform technical assessments for GenAI solutions across the domains of teaching, research, and administration. You will develop prototypes of GenAI workflows customized to client needs, including Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) bots and AI Agents. You will document and help integrate these prototypes and new functionalities into ETH's AI platform.

You will also investigate emerging tools and technologies relevant to the platform's evolution. Beyond the AI platform, you will contribute to diverse machine learning projects across ETH's research and administrative domains, developing and implementing scientific computing solutions to support various projects. Throughout all your work, you will prepare and present teaching materials on GenAI best practices and broader ML topics.

Your role also requires effectively communicating with and managing relationships across diverse stakeholders (e.g., Educational IT Services, Unit for Teaching and Learning, ETH AI Center, ETH Library), from technical experts to non-technical users.

This position requires

• PhD degree in data / computational sciences or related field
• Good understanding of the mathematical and numerical foundations of machine learning, statistical analysis and modeling
• Proficiency in Python and its ML tech stack / libraries such as Tensor Flow, PyTorch and scikit-learn
• Experience with GenAI frameworks and orchestration tools such as Lang Chain, Lang Graph, Llama Index, or similar libraries for building LLM applications
• Working and development experience with various model architectures such as transformers, as well as classical ML approaches
• Experience in building chatbots, conversational agents or RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and related technologies such as embeddings or vector databases/extensions (Milvus, Chroma, pgvector, etc.)
• Experience in applying software engineering best practices including automated testing, version control (Git), CI/CD pipelines, and containerization technologies (e.g., Docker)
• Ability to work effectively across diverse technical projects and adapt methodologies to different scientific computing challenges

• Good understanding of prompt engineering and prompt optimization strategies
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., Azure) and their ML services
• Previous working experience in developing / applying GenAI technologies in the areas of teaching and learning
• Understanding of responsible AI / AI ethics such as mitigation, hallucination detection, safety filters, interpretability

In addition to the above analytical and technical abilities, this position demands a strong interest in and ability to work with experts from various fields of expertise (also non-technical ones) and translating their requirements to solutions. This requires very good communication skills in English (German is an asset), solid…