Senior AI Researcher - Pre-training

Our Mission

Aleph Alpha is one of the few companies in Europe doing serious foundation model pre-training. Our customers — in finance, manufacturing, and public administration — need models that understand German, meet European regulatory requirements, and work reliably in high-stakes settings. We’re building that in Heidelberg.

We are hiring a Senior AI Researcher to join our Pre-training team and to advance the architecture and training of our next generation of foundation models. If you are excited about designing inference-efficient architectures, optimising training recipes that scale reliably, and training models on a large scale cluster (thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs), we would love to hear from you.

Team Culture

We foster a culture built on ownership, autonomy, and empowerment. Teams and individual contributors are trusted to take responsibility for their work and drive meaningful impact. We maintain a flat organisational structure with efficient, supportive management that enables quick decision-making, open communication, and a strong sense of shared purpose. We collaborate closely on complex technical problems, working in pairs or using mob programming to resolve challenging issues.

About the Role

As a Senior AI Researcher in Pre-training, you will work on the core technical problems that determine whether large-scale pre-training succeeds: architecture, optimisation, stability, and scaling up.

You will work at the intersection of model architecture, training dynamics, and large-scale distributed training, translating empirical observations into principled training decisions. From small-scale proxy experiments to multi-thousand-GPU runs, you will ensure our models converge as expected and scale efficiently.

We are looking for someone who combines significant research experience with strong engineering ability. You should be comfortable reasoning mathematically about training behaviour, designing rigorous experiments, and maintaining a high-qu...