TL;DR

Staff Research Scientist (AI): Leading scientific innovation for core text translation products with an accent on achieving perfect translation quality, quality estimation, and evaluation. Focus on designing, training, and optimizing large-scale, LLM-based translation models for multilingual accuracy, context awareness, robustness, and varying latency demands.

Location: Hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week in Cologne, London, or Munich.

Company

DeepL is a global AI product and research company focused on building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems.

What you will do

  • Lead hands-on research and development for core text translation products.
  • Drive innovation on methods relevant to achieving perfect translation quality as well as translation quality estimation and evaluation.
  • Design, train, and optimize large-scale, LLM-based translation models for multilingual accuracy, context awareness, robustness, and varying latency demands.
  • Own the full lifecycle of model delivery: prototyping, ablations, training, evaluation, optimization, and production deployment.
  • Work closely with engineering teams to integrate models into real-time systems, ensuring reliability, uptime, and quality at scale.
  • Mentor researchers and engineers, promote hands-on collaboration, and raise the bar for model quality and operational excellence.

Requirements

  • Deep expertise in foundations and application of machine translation.
  • A hands-on builder who enjoys training models, running experiments, debugging pipelines, and integrating ML systems into production.
  • Experience shipping ML models to production, maintaining them at scale, and working with engineers on deployment, monitoring, and serving.
  • Ability to lead complex research efforts while staying grounded in product impact, user experience, and real-world performance.
  • Strong coding and experimentation skills (Python, PyTorch/JAX, audio processing libraries).
  • Ability to communicate clearly, collaborate across teams, and align research work with product and engineering priorities.

Culture & Benefits

  • Diverse and internationally distributed team with people of more than 90 nationalities.
  • Hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week.
  • Every employee receives Virtual Shares, linking your contribution directly to DeepL’s growth.
  • Regular in-person team events.
  • Monthly full-day hacking sessions.
  • 30 days of annual leave.