PhD Internship (f/m/d)

Aleph Alpha Research’s mission is to deliver category-defining AI innovation that enables open, accessible, and trustworthy deployment of GenAI in industrial applications. Our organization develops foundational models and next-generation methods that make it easy and affordable for Aleph Alpha’s customers to increase productivity in development, engineering, logistics, and manufacturing processes.

As a PhD intern in Aleph Alpha Research, you develop new approaches to improve the state-of-the-art model architectures and applications. You are given a unique research environment with sufficient amount of compute and an industrial professional supervisor to conduct your research.

Prior to the internship, we will discuss your research interests and find alignment on a topic that fits your intrinsic research interests as well as matches our team’s mission and mid-term goals.

Please sketch your dream research topic in your application letter that is aligned to fit one of the following research teams:

In our Foundational Models team, you create powerful state-of-the art, multi-modal, foundational models, research and share novel approaches to pre-training, fine-tuning, and helpfulness, and enable cost-efficient inference on a variety of accelerators.

In our AI Agents team, you create technology to solve complex tasks that require multiple thinking / planning steps and interactions with the world, research novel approaches for agents to generalize to yet unseen tasks, and enable users to control the behaviour and ethics of models at deployment time.

In our Explainability team, you contribute to understand the fundamentals of state-of-the-art GenAI Models. Our mission is to ensure that these models are not only powerful and efficient but also transparent and trustworthy for users, developers, and stakeholders.

Your responsibilities:

• Research and development of novel approaches and algorithms that improve training, inference, interpretations or applications of foundational models

• Analysis and benchmarking of state-of-the art as well as new approaches

• Collaborating with scientists and engineers at Aleph Alpha and Aleph Alpha Research, plus chosen external industrial and academic partners

• In particular, fruitful interactions with our group of GenAI PhD students and fostering exchange between Aleph Alpha Research and your university

• Publishing own and collaborative work on machine learning venues, and making code and models source-available for use by the broader research community

Your profile:

• Enrollment in a GenAI-related PhD Program, ideally at least in 3rd year

• Solid understanding of DL/ML techniques, algorithms, and tools, for training and inference

• Experience and knowledge of Python and at least one common deep-learning framework, preferably PyTorch

• Ready to relocate to region Heidelberg, Germany

• Available for 5–6 months

• Interest to bridge the gap between addressing practical industry challenges and contributing to academic research

Our tenets

We believe embodying these values would make you a great fit in our team:

• We own work end-to-end, from idea to production: You take responsibility for every stage of the process, ensuring that our work is complete, scalable, and of the highest quality.

• We ship what matters: Your focus is on solving real problems for our customers and the research community. You prioritize delivering impactful solutions that bring value and make a difference.

• We work transparently: You collaborate and share your results openly with the team, partners, customers, and the broader community through publishing and sharing results and insight including blogposts, papers, checkpoints, and more.

• We innovate through leveraging our intrinsic motivations and talents: We strive for technical depth and to balance ideas and interests of our team with our mission-backwards approach, and leverage the interdisciplinary, diverse perspectives in our teamwork.

What you can expect from us

• Become part of an AI revolution!

• 30 days of paid vacation

• Public transport subsidy

• Fitness and wellness offerings (Wellhub)

• Mental health platform (nilo.health)

• Flexible working hours and hybrid working model