Postdoctoral Researcher: AI-Enhanced Education with LLMs

Vrije Universisteit; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 41,000 - 64,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Holiday entitlement 232 hours/year

8% holiday allowance

8.3% end-of-year bonus

ABP pension

Commuting expenses

Hybrid working enables good work-life

Job summary

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam seeks a Postdoctoral Researcher to advance LLM components for Supporting OPP workflows in education. You will design prompting strategies, structured data representations and evaluation rubrics, working closely with software developers to integrate AI into the Presentis student information system.

Collaboration with education professionals is essential. You will publish results and supervise MSc students, contributing to open-source tools and AI-driven educational

Qualifications

• PhD in AI, CS, Computational Linguistics, NLP, HCI, Data Science or closely related field.
• Ability to work in a multidisciplinary consortium with researchers, software developers and education professionals.
• Excellent English; Dutch proficiency preferred or willingness to develop Dutch.
• Affinity with education or educational technology is desirable.
• Hands-on experience with Large Language Models and modern NLP methods.
• Good programming skills, preferably Python, with ML/NLP frameworks such as PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers.
• Experience with prompt engineering and systematic evaluation of generative AI systems.
• Ability to design empirical comparisons between models, prompting strategies and configurations.

Responsibilities

• Select and benchmark state-of-the-art LLMs for Dutch-language OPP tasks.
• Develop and evaluate LLM components for generating OPP sections, e.g., Integrative Student Profile.
• Develop prompting strategies and structured input representations that combine OPP information.
• Investigate when prompt engineering suffices versus retrieval or fine-tuning.
• Develop rubric-based LLM methods for detecting quality issues in OPP text and generate improvement suggestions.
• Collaborate with software developers on architecture and API integration of LLM components.
• Define which OPP data elements are transferred to LLM and how output is incorporated into workflow.
• Publish results in AI, NLP, and Educational Technology venues.
• Supervise MSc students and engage with education professionals for co-design and user studies.

Skills

PhD AI

Multidisciplinary

English proficiency

Dutch willingness

NLP/LLM

Python

PyTorch

Transformers

Prompt engineering

Empirical evaluation

Education

PhD in AI/CS/NLP

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face Transformers

Transformers

Job description

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam seeks a Postdoctoral Researcher to advance LLM components for Supporting OPP workflows in education. You will design prompting strategies, structured data representations and evaluation rubrics, working closely with software developers to integrate AI into the Presentis student information system.

Collaboration with education professionals is essential. You will publish results and supervise MSc students, contributing to open-source tools and AI-driven educational