Senior AI R&D Engineer – Model Training (f/m/d)

Our Mission

Aleph Alpha is one of the few companies in Europe doing serious foundation model pre-training like our recently released Kolibri-1 model. Our customers - in finance, manufacturing, public administration - need models that understand German, meet European regulatory requirements, and work reliably in high-stakes settings. We're building that in Heidelberg.

Team Culture

At Aleph Alpha, 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 organizational structure with efficient, supportive management that enables quick decision-making, open communication, and a strong sense of shared purpose.

We believe a strong engineering culture is the key to model training success. We like Extreme Programming and favor trunk-based development. We often mob-program, which keeps us aligned and means we always learn from each other.

About the Role

As a Senior AI R&D Engineer in Model Training (f/m/d), you will join our model training team in Heidelberg or Berlin. Most of the team is based in Heidelberg. The model training team is building and improving our model training pipeline, which has been used to train Kolibri.

• You will work across our full stack. Some weeks you might be optimizing how training loads are scheduled on our cluster and making the pipeline more robust and performant so we can iterate faster. Other weeks, you will be enabling large-scale code execution for reinforcement learning. And at other times, you might dig deep into our evaluation codebase to lift inference throughput on evals.

• No two days are the same. Things move fast, and your ability to focus and prioritize is what lets you unblock the team day-to-day while designing the high-quality tooling and infrastructure that speeds us up long-term.

• We're still building out our training pipeline and infrastructure. Some pieces exist, some do not, and you will have real influence on what gets built and how. Your work directly shapes how quickly we can experiment and improve our models.

• Identifying issues and taking initiative is what drives our day-to-day work.

• Working mode, design decisions, priorities are all done in your team together with your team mates.
  The strongest teams often use highly collaborative techniques, like mob or pair programming.

• Due to the highly collaborative nature of our work