Research Data/ML Engineer, UCD Politics and IR, 12 months

Organisation/Company University College Dublin Research Field Computer science » Other Computer science » Other Researcher Profile Recognised Researcher (R2) Application Deadline 16 Sep 2026 - 01:30 (UTC) Country Ireland Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

Offer Description

Applications are invited for a temporary post of a Research Data/ML Engineer within UCD School of Politics and International Relations, Connected\Politics Lab, RINN AI UCD.

The Research Data/ML Engineer will lead the retrieval, evaluation and machine-learning research that determines the accuracy and trustworthiness of the answers produced by the EURVISTA platform and will operate and extend the platform's live data pipelines. The post exists to provide dedicated specialist expertise in retrieval optimisation and language-model evaluation that cannot be delivered by the project's development team alone.

The post holder will design and optimise the retrieval architecture, evaluate embedding models, benchmark query-response accuracy against a target above 90%, calibrate confidence scoring and implement hallucination mitigation. They will also prototype and validate statistical and predictive models over the platform's legislative datasets and operate and extend daily automated ingestion across European Parliament, Council of the EU and European Commission sources.

The post reports to the Principal Investigator and works alongside a Senior Full-Stack Developer and a Junior Developer (UI/UX). The role carries no supervisory or budgetary responsibility.

Closing date: 12:00 noon (local Irish time) on 16 September 2026.

Applications must be submitted by the closing date and time specified. Any applications which are still in progress at the closing time of 12:00 noon (Local Irish Time) on the specified closing date will be cancelled automatically by the system. UCD are unable to accept late applications.

UCD do not require assistance from Recruitment Agencies. Any CV's submitted by Recruitment Agencies will be returned.

Machine learning, Natural language processing, Large language models, Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Embeddings and vector search, Python, Data engineering and ETL, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, PyTorch, Hugging Face, LangChain

Additional Information

Eligibility criteria

Mandatory:

• A primary degree in computer science, data science, machine learning, statistics or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Demonstrated research or applied experience in natural language processing and large language models.
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings and vector search.
• Strong Python programming skills.
• Experience designing and running evaluations of model or system performance, including benchmarking against defined accuracy targets.
• Experience building and operating data pipelines (ETL/ELT), including web scraping or API-based ingestion.
• Experience with relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL) and search or vector stores (e.g. OpenSearch/Elasticsearch).
• Familiarity with machine-learning frameworks such as PyTorch, Hugging Face or LangChain.
• An understanding of the operational requirements for a successful research project.
• Excellent communication skills (oral, written, presentation).
• Excellent organisational and administrative skills, including a proven ability to work to deadlines.

Candidates must demonstrate an awareness of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).