What you'll do
Foundation models represent one of the most powerful and promising advancements in Deep Learning, and their application to scientific domains is a rapidly evolving area of research.
At CERN’s IT-CE group, we are exploring the development of a foundation model tailored to particle physics: one capable of interpreting the behavior of particles within High Energy Physics (HEP) detectors and supporting a wide range of tasks relevant to experimental data processing.
This work is carried out in close collaboration with a multidisciplinary team of experts from leading institutes across Europe in the context of TURING, a EC funded project .
As a successful candidate, you will contribute to the design and training of transformer-based architectures using data from calorimeters, specialised detectors that measure particle energy in collider experiments.
Your work will involve investigating methodologies such as self-supervised learning to enable multi-task capabilities, while optimising for computational efficiency.
We are looking for candidates with a strong background in Computer Science or a closely related field. Experience with Deep Learning, transformer models, or scientific data is highly desirable. This position is available immediately.
Your responsibilities
- Take an active role within the TURING project, leading the performance evaluation and use case validation tasks.
- Developing a robust prototype capable of generalising across multiple detector use cases.
- Contributing to tightening the collaborations with the CERN experimental physics community on the topic of foundation models for HEP.
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Your profile
- Proven experience developing, training, and deploying deep learning models in production environments, with hands-on expertise in neural network architectures, large-scale data processing, model optimisation, and performance evaluation.
- Your studies focused on Data Science, Mathematics or Physics.
Your skills
- Strong proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch and/or TensorFlow), machine learning algorithms, data analysis libraries (NumPy, Pandas), GPU-based training, software engineering best practices, Git version control, Docker, and MLOps tools for experiment tracking and model deployment.
- Spoken and written English, with a commitment to learn French.
Employment conditions
- Stand-by duty, when required by the needs of the Organization.
- Work during nights, Sundays and official holidays, when required by the needs of the Organization.
Global Benefits at CERN
Let's get you ready
Be sure to meet the eligibility criteria
- You are a national of a CERN Member State or Associate Member State. Currently, we cannot consider applications from Pakistani, Lithuanian, Latvian, Cypriot and Croatian nationals, as the ceiling defined under Article II.5 of the Associate Membership Agreement has been reached.
- By the application deadline, you have a master’s degree with 2 to 6 years of professional experience since graduation or a PhD with a maximum of 3 years of professional experience since graduation. You are not eligible with only a bachelor’s degree.
- You have never had a CERN fellow or graduate contract before.
- Please pay attention to the additional criteria and requirements for this specific position and mentioned above.
You will need these documents to complete your application
- Your CV (English or French)
- A copy of your most relevant diploma or a certificate of achievement from your school (if you don't yet have your paper diploma)
- Any document you consider relevant to your application