Postdoctoral Researcher in Confidential High Performance Computing for AI in Cancer Care (100%)

High Performance Computing (HPC) Research Group

Start date: September 2026 (flexible)
Duration: 3 years (36 months)

Project
The High Performance Computing (HPC) research group (Prof. Florina M. Ciorba), Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Basel, invites applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher funded by the SNF Bridge Discovery project "Family Gene Toolkit (FGT)" (grant no. 237643), a digital platform supporting families affected by hereditary cancer syndromes (HBOC, Lynch Syndrome). The next-generation FGT v3.0 will integrate large language models, multilingual AI, and confidential HPC to support patients and clinicians in real-world healthcare environments.

Your position

You will lead research on trustworthy and aligned LLMs operating in confidential HPC environments, involving training and adapting 70B-scale multilingual and medical language models on secure HPC infrastructure. Your work focuses on three areas:

• Preference optimization and LLM alignment: design preference- based training and fine-tuning methods (RLHF, PPO, DPO, reward modeling) for medical and multilingual LLMs.
• Agentic and tool-augmented AI systems: develop reasoning and interaction capabilities including RAG, in-context learning, chain-of-thought reasoning, and agentic workflows with external tools.
• Trustworthy AI evaluation and confidential deployment: develop evaluation pipelines (e.g., LLM-as-a-judge), robustness/ bias/hallucination mitigation, and multilingual evaluation protocols.

As part of this position, your tasks also include:

• Conduct high-quality research aligned with the project objectives
• Publish in top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL/EMNLP, MLSys, SC, HPDC, EuroSys, ASPLOS, etc.)
• Present research at international conferences, workshops, and seminars
• Contribute to open-source software and reproducible research artifacts
• Collaborate actively, fruitfully, and respectfully with the PIs, the HPC group, and partner institutions
• Contribute to teaching (max. one class per semester) and co-supervise Bachelor’s/Master’s students

Your profile

We seek a highly motivated researcher interested in integrating foundational AI and HPC research with real-world healthcare applications.

Required

• PhD in Computer Science / AI / Machine Learning
• Strong publication record in AI, ML systems, or related areas
• Strong programming skills in Python, C/C++ and experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or similar ML frameworks
• Experience with large-scale training or inference of LLMs
• Interest in LLM alignment, reinforcement learning, or generative AI systems
• Fluency in English; clear communication, problem-solving, and collaborative mindset

Highly desirable

• Experience with distributed training or ML systems
• Knowledge of privacy-enhancing technologies and parallel programming
• Experience with multilingual AI or agentic systems

Diversity: We welcome applications from candidates with diverse backgrounds. Even if you do not meet all requirements, we encourage you to apply if you identify with the profile.

We offer you

• Competitive 100% funding per SNSF guidelines (~CHF 90’000/year)
• Access to modern GPU clusters and confidential- computing infrastructure
• Collaboration with leading researchers in AI & HPC systems and digital health
• Support for international conference travel and networking
• Stimulating research environment at a leading European university

Application / Contact

Interested?

Submita single PDF file (named Lastname-Firstname-Postdoc-FGT -Application.pdf)and a motivation statement via the application portal containing:

• Curriculum vitae with publication list (open-access links)
• Degree Transcripts (Bachelor’s, Master’s, Doctoral)
• Theses (Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral)
• Links to own code repositories or software projects
• At least one relevant publication with a short justification
• Motivation statement addressing the questions: (1) why this position, (2) which aspects interest you, (3) relevant prior experience, and (4) goals during the postdoc
• Contact details for 1-2 referees (recommendation letters will be discarded)

Application deadline: April 24, 2026 (rolling review until filled). Only short-listed candidates will be invited for interview. Due to the anticipated volume of applications, notifications are sent only to short-listed applicants.

Applications by e-mail will not be considered. For recruiters/ staffing agencies: Acquisition in response to this advertisement is not appreciated.

For questions: EmailProf. Florina M. Ciorba ( florina.ciorba@ unibas.ch ) with subject: "BRIDGE FGT - Postdoc position"

www.unibas.ch')