Artificial Intelligence Researcher

shortlistd.io; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

shortlistd.io is seeking a Principal NLP Scientist to drive the design, research, and deployment of advanced NLP and LLM capabilities across core production systems. You will bridge research and product impact, turning state-of-the-art NLP into reliable, scalable workflows for electronic supply chains.

You will lead technical direction, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and mentor junior ML/NLP engineers, contributing to a high-impact, production-focused language automation platform.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science or related technical field.
• 8+ years of experience in ML/AI/NLP.
• 5+ years building, deploying and maintaining NLP models for production.
• Strong understanding of modern neural architectures and NLP tasks.
• Experience with LLMs, RAG, and production deployment.

Responsibilities

• Define the scientific and technical direction for NLP/LLM capabilities across internal platforms.
• Design, evaluate, and scale NLP solutions for NER, text classification, text generation, semantic search, document understanding, and information extraction.
• Lead design and deployment of LLMs, hybrid RAG pipelines, and semantic search architectures.
• Collaborate with software engineers, data engineers, product managers, and data teams to build language-driven automation systems.
• Design rigorous experiments, establish evaluation baselines, and communicate trade-offs to stakeholders.
• Lead data strategy for training data, annotation guidelines, and model validation quality.
• Mentor junior ML/NLP team members.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

HuggingFace

ONNX

Pandas

NumPy

SciPy

scikit-learn

SQL

Azure

AWS

English communication

Education

PhD in CS/ML/AI or related field

Tools

Hugging Face Transformers

Neo4j

FalkorDB

Docker

ONNX

Job description

Principal NLP Scientist

• Location: Amsterdam or Munich
• Employment Type: Full-time

About the company

Our client is a premier global distributor of electronic components and an end-to-end supply chain solutions provider. They develop pioneering e-commerce marketplaces, digital supply chain tools, and real-time market data platforms that make global electronics procurement more transparent, fast, and seamless.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Principal NLP Scientist to serve as a senior technical leader and individual contributor directly reporting to the CTO. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, researching, and improving advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities for our core production business systems. You will bridge the gap between applied research and practical product impact—transforming state-of-the‑art NLP technologies into reliable, measurable, maintainable, and highly efficient production workflows that power the future of electronic supply chains.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Strategy: Define the scientific and technical direction for NLP and LLM capabilities across our internal platforms and operational workflows. Provide expert guidance on what is technically viable, reliable, and production–ready.
• Model Development & Applied Research: Design, evaluate, and scale NLP solutions for named entity recognition (NER), text classification, text generation, semantic search, document understanding, and information extraction.
• LLM & RAG Integration: Lead the design and deployment of Large Language Models, hybrid retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, semantic search, and GraphRAG architectures.
• Cross‑Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with software engineers, data engineers, product managers, data analysts, and data annotation teams to build, evaluate, and constantly refine language‑driven automation systems.
• Experimentation & Quality: Design rigorous, measurable experiments, establish evaluation baselines, define success metrics, compare model approaches, and clearly communicate the trade‑offs to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Data Strategy: Lead standards for training data preparation, annotation strategy, labeling guidelines, and model validation quality.
• Mentorship: Provide technical leadership and guidance to help mentor and grow junior machine learning and NLP team members.

Required Qualifications (Must‑Haves)

• Education: PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Applied Mathematics, Data Science, or a closely related technical field.
• Experience:
  • 8+ years of professional experience in machine learning, artificial intelligence, or NLP.
  • 5+ years of hands‑on experience building, deploying, and maintaining NLP models for production or near‑production systems.
• Deep Neural Architectures: Strong understanding of modern neural network architectures, including RNN, CNN, Transformer‑based architectures, attention mechanisms, embeddings, fine‑tuning strategies, layers, modules, and loss functions.
• Core NLP Tasks: Practical experience with NER, text classification, text generation, semantic similarity, and document understanding.
• LLM & RAG Expertise: Deep experience working with Large Language Models, including model evaluation, prompt design, fine‑tuning, retrieval‑augmented generation, and deployment for safe production usage.
• Technical Stack:
  • Strong hands‑on coding skills in Python.
  • Strong experience with PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers.
  • Experience with ONNX or other model optimization / model serving formats.
  • Proficiency with standard data libraries: Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, scikit‑learn, and Matplotlib.
  • Experience working with SQL databases and querying structured business data.
• Cloud & Tools: Hands‑on experience with cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure or AWS) and experience working within Agile software engineering workflows.
• Leadership & Communication: Ability to provide technical leadership and mentor junior engineers without requiring formal people management authority. Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice‑to‑Haves)

• Experience leading NLP or AI research initiatives within a commercial, production‑focused environment.
• Experience with multilingual NLP systems.
• Familiarity with vector databases, semantic search architectures, and knowledge graph concepts (including LLM integration with graph databases like Neo4j, FalkorDB, or similar).
• Knowledge of model serving, monitoring, drift detection, and production ML observability tools.
• Experience with Docker, containerized ML workloads, and modern MLOps / CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience working directly with data annotation teams to draft high‑quality labeling instructions.
• Experience with .NET / C#, ASP.NET Core, or integrating ML services into enterprise software platforms.
• Academic publications, patents, or recognized public technical contributions in NLP, ML, or applied AI.