Context And Mission
The Speech Team at the newly established AI Institute hosted at BSC brings together extensive expertise in several areas, including automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speech LLMs, with a particular emphasis on low-resource languages and settings. In addition, the AI Institute has been entrusted by both the Spanish and Catalan governments with the mission of developing foundational open-source resources and technologies for Spanish and Catalan.
The Speech Team contributes to two flagship national initiatives: the AINA project, funded by the Catalan Ministry of Digital Policy and aimed at advancing AI resources for Catalan, and the ALIA project, funded by the Spanish Secretariat of Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence and aimed at AI resources for the cooficial languages in Spain. The team also participates in a range of EU- and other nationally funded research projects.
The AI Institute is looking for a junior research engineer to work on the extension of large language models to include the speech modality and in end-to-end speech-to-speech models. The selected candidate will work in a highly sophisticated HPC environment, access state-of-the-art systems and computational infrastructures, and collaborate and work closely with the group members.
Key Duties
* Develop innovative modules for automatic speech recognition with deep learning.
* Participation in internal group meetings and other scientific discussions.
* Writing and presentation of research papers.
* Participation in current projects related to speech technologies including but not limited to research, documentation and deliverables.
* Collaborate in research and presentation of new scientific projects.
* Collaborate with the members of the group in the generation and evaluation of language resources.
Requirements
* Education
o Bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics or related subjects, with specialization in speech processing and recognition, and background in computation.
o A master's degree is desired but not mandatory.
* Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience
o Machine learning.
o Programming skills in Linux, Python, Deep learning libraries, git.
o Ability to conduct scientific literature review and evaluation.
* Additional Knowledge and Professional Experience
o Fluency in spoken and written English, Spanish and/or Catalan are desired.
o Strong interest in Speech and Natural Language Processing.
* Competences
o Good communication and presentation skills.
o Ability to work under set deadlines.
o Ability to work both independently and within a team.
Conditions
* The position will be located at BSC within the Directors Department
* We offer a full-time contract (35h/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: 22 days of holidays + 6 personal days + 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
* Starting date: 01/07/2026