Role overview
Prof. Dr. Rico Sennrich**
Head of the Text Technology Research Group
What you'll work on
The position is created in collaboration with Lia Rumantscha to promote language technology for the Romansh language. An official language of Switzerland, Romansh is especially interesting for AI research due to its ultra-high typological diversity, its small and vibrant speaker community and the availability of many untapped data resources. Your position covers both applied research (e.g., optimizing machine translation and OCR systems) and basic research (e.g., contributing to cutting-edge foundation models such as Apertus via the Swiss AI Initiative). This research will be enabled through in-house high-performance GPUs (H100), the CSCS Supercomputing Centre and cloud credits for commercial APIs.
You will have some freedom to develop your own approach but will also be collaborating closely with other members of the department, including student assistants, text technology researchers and speech technology researchers, and with external stakeholders.
What we're looking for
- a PhD degree (or imminent PhD degree) in computational linguistics, computer science, AI, or a related discipline
- strong software engineering skills and open-source contributions
- prior publications in machine learning and/or natural language processing
- strong communication skills (English: essential; Romansh, German or Italian: desirable)
Interview process
Start of employment June 2026 or by agreement, temporary
You will be joining the Department of Computational Linguistics, which has 6 Research Groups and around 70 postdoctoral and student researchers in the areas of Text Technologies, Phonetics and Speech Sciences, Digital Linguistics, Computational Neuroscience of Speech & Hearing, Language, Technology and Accessibility as well as Language Technology.
The Text Technology Research Group invites applications for a part-time postdoc or senior researcher position. The appointment will be for two years and start in June 2026 or by agreement.