---
title: 'Senior AI R&D Engineer – Model Training  (f/m/d) at Aleph Alpha'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-r-d-engineer-model-training-f-m-d-aleph-alpha-heidelberg-xqr3y48gda71'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-18'
---

# Senior AI R&D Engineer – Model Training  (f/m/d) at Aleph Alpha

- **Company:** Aleph Alpha
- **Location:** Heidelberg, Germany
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-18
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/AlephAlpha/0ed0c9ef-8e9f-4161-80e6-55fc95c93736/application

**Skills:** Distributed systems, Kubernetes, Large-scale data processing, Distributed computation, Performance engineering, Profiling, Benchmarking, Code optimization

> Join the model training team to design, build, and maintain infrastructure for foundation model pre- and post-training. You will optimize training pipelines, enable large-scale code execution, and improve inference throughput while collaborating with researchers.

## Job description

## Our Mission

Aleph Alpha is one of the few companies in Europe doing serious foundation model pre- and post-training. We're building models that have general-purpose capabilities, and specifically excel at addressing the needs of our customers. We're looking for exceptional Software Engineers to join our model training team. Most of the team is based in Heidelberg .

## Team Culture

At Aleph Alpha, we foster a culture built on ownership, autonomy, and empowerment. Teams and individual contributors are trusted to take responsibility for their work and drive meaningful impact. We maintain a flat organizational structure with efficient, supportive management that enables quick decision-making, open communication, and a strong sense of shared purpose. We believe a strong engineering culture is the key to model training success. We like Extreme Programming and favor trunk-based development. We often mob-program, which keeps us aligned and means we always learn from each other.

## About the Role

As a Senior AI R&D Engineer in Model Training (f/m/d), you will join our model training team in Heidelberg or Berlin. Most of the team is based in Heidelberg. The model training team is building and improving our model training pipeline, which has been used to train Kolibri.

- You will work across our full stack. Some weeks you might be optimizing how training loads are scheduled on our cluster and making the pipeline more robust and performant so we can iterate faster. Other weeks, you will be enabling large-scale code execution for reinforcement learning. And at other times, you might dig deep into our evaluation codebase to lift inference throughput on evals.
- No two days are the same. Things move fast, and your ability to focus and prioritize is what lets you unblock the team day-to-day while designing the high-quality tooling and infrastructure that speeds us up long-term.
- We're still building out our training pipeline and infrastructure. Some pieces exist, some do not, and you will have real influence on what gets built and how. Your work directly shapes how quickly we can experiment and improve our models.
- Identifying issues and taking initiative is what drives our day-to-day work.
- Working mode, design decisions, priorities are all done in your team together with your team mates. The strongest teams often use highly collaborative techniques, like mob or pair programming.
- Due to the highly collaborative nature of our work you are expected to be on-site at least two days a week. If you are in Berlin, you should expect to travel around every second month for a few days to Heidelberg.
- We are specifically looking to strengthen the Software Engineering in the teams which are research heavy. Major points include improving the maintainability of our code through tests and design & architecture changes.

## Requirements

- At its core, you need to be able to dive into a codebase, change the behavior as necessary, and after the change the code should be better tested and easier to understand than before.
- As such we look for candidates for an understanding of how to design for low coupling and high cohesion paired with the ability to incrementally refactor.
- Experience with the following technologies is likely to be helpful:
- Test Driven Development (TDD)
- Trunk based development
- Continuous integration
- Domain Driven Design

Nice-to-haves

- Most of our code is in Python, there is also the occasional Rust codebase.
- Large parts of our training pipeline are built on top of Kubernetes.
- We do not hire for skills in a particular technology or language, but rather ability to learn and mindset, yet experience with these technologies is a plus.

## What we offer

- Become part of an AI revolution!
- 30 days of paid vacation
- Access to a variety of fitness & wellness offerings via [Wellhub](https://wellhub.com/de-de/)
- Mental health support through [nilo.health](http://nilo.health/)
- Substantially subsidized company pension plan for your future security
- Subsidized Germany-wide transportation ticket
- Budget for additional technical equipment
- Flexible working hours for better work-life balance and hybrid working model
- [JobRad®](https://www.jobrad.org/) Bike Lease

## About Aleph Alpha

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Aleph Alpha is a German AI startup that develops sovereign large language models (SLLMs) for enterprises and governments, emphasizing data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, and domain-specific performance.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B; acquired by Cohere in a landmark agreement)
- **Headquarters**: Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Jonas Andrulis, Samuel Weinbach

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI, Large Language Models), Enterprise Software, Government Technology
- **Target customers**: B2B exclusively — enterprises in industry, public sector, and defense where data sovereignty and domain expertise are critical
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "We empower enterprises and public institutions to transform their most critical knowledge." The company operates under the principles of Trust, Responsibility, and Sovereignty.

## Products & Services
- **Luminous LLM**: A family of large language models designed for enterprise and government use, with a focus on transparency of sources used to generate results. The models are trained on customer-specific domains (legal, administrative, industrial, scientific) and run exclusively on European infrastructure.
- **Sovereign Large Language Models (SLLMs)**: Custom-built, secure language models tailored to a customer's domain and workflows, paired with custom evaluation frameworks to ensure performance before deployment.
- **AI Agent Solutions**: Deployed for tasks like retrieving verifiable insights from sensitive documentation (e.g., reducing search time by 90% at a global chip manufacturer) and AI-powered requirements engineering (e.g., 40% time savings on RFQ processing for an automotive supplier).
- **AI Assistant for Government**: A sovereign AI assistant deployed in a government agency, empowering 80,000 users to streamline administrative processes.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of $100M (as of latest data); Total Funding of $633.6M (across 6 rounds, including a $500M Series B led by Schwarz Group, Bosch Ventures, and others)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Cohere (acquirer), Schwarz Group, Bosch Ventures, 468 Capital, LEA Partners, Lakestar, EarlyBird, and 18+ other investors. Key partners include global chip manufacturers, automotive suppliers, and government agencies.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount of 275 employees (+17% YoY); operates in 9 countries (Germany, Switzerland, Romania, Nigeria, Brazil, France, Peru, Austria, Netherlands); acquired thingsTHINKING (April 2025); landmark agreement with Cohere for operational realignment and partnership.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Data Sovereignty & Compliance**: All models run on European infrastructure and are trained in accordance with EU law, making them uniquely suited for regulated industries (defense, public sector, legal) where data cannot leave the continent.
- **Domain-Specific Customization**: Unlike general-purpose models, Aleph Alpha's SLLMs are trained on a customer's own domain knowledge and workflows, with custom evaluation frameworks that prove performance before deployment.
- **Proven Track Record in Sensitive Environments**: Demonstrated success in government (80,000 users), defense, and industrial settings where precision and reliability are non-negotiable.
- **End-to-End Partnership Model**: The company co-builds solutions with customers from first use case through production deployment, ensuring the technology fits existing processes.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Deepening the partnership with Cohere for operational realignment and scaling; expanding sovereign AI solutions for European enterprises and governments; continuing to build domain-specific SLLMs for legal, administrative, industrial, and scientific sectors.
- **Direction for growth**: Focus on mission-critical, sensitive environments where general-purpose AI fails; expanding across European public sector and defense; leveraging the Cohere partnership for broader reach and resources.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: The company emphasizes collaboration, openness, and a deep commitment to responsibility. The team is described as international, with engineers, scientists, and innovators working across four German locations. The mission is centered on "Trust. Responsibility. Sovereignty."
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Based on job postings, roles are primarily on-site in Heidelberg, with some flexibility. The company has locations in Heidelberg, Speyer, and other German cities.
- **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Strong focus on research and engineering (33% of workforce in technical roles, 8% in research). The tech stack includes TensorFlow, Kubernetes, Flask, MLflow, and more. The company has filed 4 patents related to AI model compression and performance. Recent departures of key executives (e.g., Co-CEO Ilhan Scheer, COO Ben Oppl) suggest a period of transition, but the company is actively hiring for senior AI research and engineering roles.
- **Employee ratings**: 3.2/5.0 on employer review platforms (Work-Life: 3.5, Compensation: 3.5, Culture: 3.1, Career: 3.5). The company has 15 active job postings, with a strong focus on senior AI researchers and software engineers.

## Sources
1. [Aleph Alpha Website](https://aleph-alpha.com/)
2. [Aleph Alpha Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/AlephAlpha)
3. [LinkedIn Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/aleph-alpha/)
4. [CB Insights Company Profile](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/aleph-alpha)

## Other roles at Aleph Alpha

- [Senior AI R&D Engineer - Performance - Pre-training (f/m/d)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-r-d-engineer-performance-pre-training-f-m-d-aleph-alpha-heidelberg-63c77hha52h8) — Heidelberg, Germany
- [Senior AI Researcher: LLM post-training for hallucination reduction (f/m/d)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-researcher-llm-post-training-for-hallucination-reduction-f-m-d-aleph-zap2g8gcb5g4) — Heidelberg, Germany
- [Senior AI Researcher- Pre-training (f/m/d)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-researcher-pre-training-f-m-d-aleph-alpha-heidelberg-s5v2ewqeev20) — Heidelberg, Germany