AI Engineer for Academic Services and Program Support

About the role

The Center for Digital Education at EPFL collaborates with academic support units to build AI services that help answer requests from students, instructors and teaching sections, including document evaluation, verification and classification, and document editing such as course descriptions. The AI Engineer designs, develops and deploys safe and secure AI systems using Large Language Models hosted on EPFL's secure infrastructure, working with the Teaching Support Centre, the Registrar's office and Central IT services.

Key responsibilities

• Support pedagogical processes: extract topics and categorize comments in course evaluations, and support the description of skills against competence frameworks in course descriptions.
• Support administrative processes: analyse and check the quality of administrative documents, and support administrators in complex decision-making.
• All work must respect fairness and data security, with potential solutions tested and evaluated together with the benchmark engineer.

Required profile

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, AI or a related field.
• 2-3 years of professional experience in ML/AI application development.
• Strong background in Large Language Models.
• Desired: experience in educational technology or learning analytics, knowledge of educational assessment theory, and a background in AI ethics and responsible AI.
• English (C1) and French.

Required skills

• Expert Python programming and ML frameworks.
• LLM application development: RAG systems, prompt engineering, fine-tuning.
• Computer vision/OCR, such as handwriting recognition or document processing.
• API development and data engineering.
• Familiarity with vector databases and semantic search.

What we offer

• Work at the intersection of AI and education at a leading technical university, with access to EPFL's secure on-premise AI infrastructure (GPU clusters, local LLMs).
• State-of-the-art GPU computing, open-weight models and commercial APIs, and integration with Graph AI, Intelligent Agents and a chatbot framework.
• Continuous learning through courses and training, and the chance to contribute to open-source educational AI tools.

Fixed-term contract starting 01/04/2027, duration 1 year, activity rate between 80% and 100%.