Postdoc: Architecting Multimodal AI Data Systems

ZHAW International; Winterthur; On-site; CHF 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW invites a Postdoctoral Researcher to optimize data systems for multimodal AI workloads, including SQL queries and ML tasks. The role collaborates with IBM Research Europe – Zurich, starting 1.1.2027.

The work spans databases, distributed systems, and machine learning systems, with teaching assistance in Databases and Intelligent Information Systems. Excellent communication in German is a plus.

Qualifications

• PhD required in Computer Science or related field.
• Strong background in distributed systems (e.g. Spark) and relational databases (Postgres or DuckDB).
• Solid programming skills in Python.
• Interest in publishing in leading systems and AI conferences such as VLDB, SIGMOD, ICDE.

Responsibilities

• Develop architectures for multimodal AI pipelines.
• Investigate optimization techniques for AI pipelines across heterogeneous systems.
• Build resource management and scheduling for CPUs, GPUs, and accelerators.
• Enable efficient execution of AI workflows with multiple models interacting.

Skills

distributed systems

relational databases

machine learning

Python

Education

PhD in Computer Science / AI / Data Engineering

Tools

PostgreSQL

DuckDB

Spark

Presto

Job description

Zurich University of Applied Sciences ZHAW invites a Postdoctoral Researcher to optimize data systems for multimodal AI workloads, including SQL queries and ML tasks. The role collaborates with IBM Research Europe – Zurich, starting 1.1.2027.

The work spans databases, distributed systems, and machine learning systems, with teaching assistance in Databases and Intelligent Information Systems. Excellent communication in German is a plus.