Research Engineer, NeuroAI

EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is one of the most dynamic university campuses in Europe and ranks among the top 20 universities worldwide. The EPFL employs more than 6,500 people supporting the three main missions of the institutions: education, research and innovation. The EPFL campus offers an exceptional working environment at the heart of a community of more than 18,500 people, including over 14,000 students and 4,000 researchers from more than 120 different countries.

Mission

A guiding goalpost for the EPFL NeuroAI Lab is to build an in-silico "digital twin" of the human brain. Such a computational understanding of natural intelligence is advanced by tightly coupled scientific enquiry and rigorous engineering to address real-world problems that are beyond current machine capabilities.  To achieve this vision, we must treat the study of natural intelligence and efforts to build intelligent systems as two interlocked aspects of the same grand challenge, with neuroscientists and cognitive scientists working alongside computer scientists and software engineers.

Our group develops and maintains software systems that accelerate and integrate these aspects. A key tool in this endeavor is Brain-Score , a platform that evaluates computational models on their alignment to neural and behavioral brain data in the domains of vision and language. This comparison helps researchers understand how closely aligned a particular computational model is with data collected from humans and non-human primates, allowing them to dig deeper into areas of similarity or difference. In addition, the EPFL NeuroAI Lab is building ambitious whole-brain models co-trained with large-scale neural and behavioral data, with which we aim to enable new translational applications to treat the brain.

Position Overview

The NeuroAI Engineer will work with an established user base and interdisciplinary researchers at EPFL and worldwide to maintain and develop Brain-Score, package large-scale datasets for model training and testing, and ensure an accessible open-source software stack. This includes determining requirements, iterating on architectural specifications, and ensuring a robust, scalable system that meets identified research needs.

Principal Duties and Responsibilities:

• Maintain all software components of the Brain-Score platform: brain and behavior benchmarks (data and metrics), candidate models, website, and automated submission platform.
• Support researchers in the EPFL NeuroAI Lab in the development, testing, and application of novel whole-brain models.
• Work closely with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows on specific research thrusts in the form of new data, metrics, and computational models.
• Support users in the EPFL NeuroAI Lab and worldwide to contribute new models and new benchmarks to Brain-Score.
• Develop new features such as broadening the scope of the platform to new behaviors and brain regions, causal intervention benchmarks, automatic incorporation of benchmarks from new neural recordings, and preparing the platform for community-wide competitions; collaboratively with engineers at the MIT Quest for Intelligence.
• Organize, plan, and execute the future development of the Brain-Score platform.
• Other duties as assigned.

 

Supervision Received:

This position will be supervised by Martin Schrimpf.

Supervision Exercised:

Ability to provide technical leadership to EPFL students.

Qualifications & Skills Required

Required:

• Experience: 1-3 years as a machine learning engineer or software engineer
• Education: MSc or PhD in Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience in machine learning/NeuroAI
• At least three years of programming experience in Python
• Experience building large-scale full-stack software systems, including the use of git-based version control and CI/CD
• Excellent written and verbal English communication
• Strong project-management, analytical, problem-solving, organizational, and decision-making skills
• The ability to work effectively and productively in a highly dynamic environment across all levels with faculty, staff, students, other members of the EPFL community, and Brain-Score users worldwide
  

Preferred:

• Experience in at least two of the following: computer vision, optimization, natural language understanding, collection and analysis of behavioral data, collection and analysis of neural data, high performance distributed computing
• Research experience developing and testing machine learning models
• Research experience developing and testing models of the brain and cognition
• Familiarity with one or more cloud platforms
• Experience with web development and maintenance
• Experience with virtualization and containerization

Informations

Contract Start Date : 04/01/2026 or to be agreed upon

Activity Rate Min : 50.00

Activity Rate Max : 100.00

Contract Type: CDD

Duration: 1 year 

Reference: 2096 

We offer

 

• A dynamic and multicultural work environment within a multidisciplinary institution of international renown
• The opportunity to take part in large-scale, motivating, and diverse projects
• Attractive working conditions
• Opportunities for continuous professional development