Postdoctoral Researcher in Confidential High Performance Computing for AI in Cancer Care (100%)

19 mars 2026
100%
Basel

À propos de cette offre

Start date: September 2026 (flexible)
Duration: 3 years (36 months)

Project
The High Performance Computing (HPC) research group (Prof. Florina M. Ciorba), Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Basel, invites applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher funded by the SNF Bridge Discovery project "Family Gene Toolkit (FGT)" (grant no. 237643), a digital platform supporting families affected by hereditary cancer syndromes (HBOC, Lynch Syndrome). The next-generation FGT v3.0 will integrate large language models, multilingual AI, and confidential HPC to support patients and clinicians in real-world healthcare environments.

Your position

You will lead research on trustworthy and aligned LLMs operating in confidential HPC environments, involving training and adapting 70B-scale multilingual and medical language models on secure HPC infrastructure. Your work focuses on three areas:

Preference optimization and LLM alignment: design preference-based training and fine-tuning methods (RLHF, PPO, DPO, reward modeling) for medical and multilingual LLMs.

Agentic and tool-augmented AI systems: develop reasoning and interaction capabilities including RAG, in-context learning, chain-of-thought reasoning, and agentic workflows with external tools.

Trustworthy AI evaluation and confidential deployment: develop evaluation pipelines (e.g., LLM-as-a-judge), robustness/bias/hallucination mitigation, and multilingual evaluation protocols.

As part of this position, your tasks also include:

Conduct high-quality research aligned with the project objectives

Publish in top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL/EMNLP, MLSys, SC, HPDC, EuroSys, ASPLOS, etc.)

Present research at international conferences, workshops, and seminars

Contribute to open-source software and reproducible research artifacts

Collaborate actively, fruitfully, and respectfully with the PIs, the HPC group, and partner institutions

Contribute to teaching (max. one class per semester) and co-supervise Bachelor's/Master's students

Your profile

We seek a highly motivated researcher interested in integrating foundational AI and HPC research with real-world healthcare applications.

Required

PhD in Computer Science / AI / Machine Learning

Strong publication record in AI, ML systems, or related areas

Strong programming skills in Python, C/C++ and experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or similar ML frameworks

Experience with large-scale training or inference of LLMs

Interest in LLM alignment, reinforcement learning, or generative AI systems

Fluency in English; clear communication, problem-solving, and collaborative mindset

Highly desirable

Experience with distributed training or ML systems

Knowledge of privacy-enhancing technologies and parallel programming

Experience with multilingual AI or agentic systems

Diversity: We welcome applications from candidates with diverse backgrounds. Even if you do not meet all requirements, we encourage you to apply if you identify with the profile.

We offer you

Competitive 100% funding per SNSF guidelines (~CHF 90'000/year)

Access to modern GPU clusters and confidential-computing infrastructure

Collaboration with leading researchers in AI & HPC systems and digital health

Support for international conference travel and networking

Stimulating research environment at a leading European university

Application / Contact

Interested?

Submit a single PDF file (named Lastname-Firstname-Postdoc-FGT-Application.pdf) and a motivation statement via the application portal containing:

Curriculum vitae with publication list (open-access links)

Degree Transcripts (Bachelor's, Master's, Doctoral)

Theses (Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctoral)

Links to own code repositories or software projects

At least one relevant publication with a short justification

Motivation statement addressing the questions: (1) why this position, (2) which aspects interest you, (3) relevant prior experience, and (4) goals during the postdoc

Contact details for 1-2 referees (recommendation letters will be discarded)

Application deadline: April 24, 2026 (rolling review until filled). Only short-listed candidates will be invited for interview. Due to the anticipated volume of applications, notifications are sent only to short-listed applicants.

Applications by e-mail will not be considered. For recruiters/staffing agencies: Acquisition in response to this advertisement is not appreciated.

For questions: Email Prof. Florina M. Ciorba (Write an email) with subject: "BRIDGE FGT - Postdoc position"

Universität Basel
4000 Basel