Senior Research Data Engineer

DeepL is a global communications platform powered by Language AI. Since 2017, we’ve been on a mission to break down language barriers. Our human-sounding translations and intelligent writing suggestions are designed with enterprise security in mind. Today, they enable over 100,000 businesses to transform communications, reach new markets, and improve productivity. And, empower millions of individuals worldwide to make sense of the world and express their ideas.

Our goal is to become the global leader in Language AI, building products that drive better communication, foster connections, and make a real-life impact. To achieve this, we need talented individuals like you to join our exciting journey. If you're ready to work with a dynamic team and build your career in the fast-moving AI space, DeepL is your next destination.

What sets us apart is our blend of modern technology, competitive benefits, and an open, welcoming work culture that enables our people to thrive. When we share what it's like to work at DeepL, the reactions are overwhelmingly positive. This may be because of our products that have helped countless people worldwide or our shared mission to improve communication for individuals and businesses, bringing cultures closer together. What we know for sure is this: being part of DeepL means joining a team dedicated to innovation and employee well-being. Discover what our teams have to say about life at DeepL on LinkedIn, Instagram and our Blog.

DeepL is renowned for its AI products - from language and translation, to enterprise agents. At the core of these products are custom-built algorithms and models that are trained using data. The quality and volume of data are key factors in our success.

You will join our Foundation Model Training team. As a cross-functional team of research scientists and data engineers specialising in machine learning, we develop foundation models and manage the pre-training corpora and associated data preparation pipelines. We work with unstructured data on a petabyte scale. This is a fast-paced and highly competitive field where we face challenging problems at the frontier of research and engineering.

• Work on ambitious frontier research projects as part of a foundation model training research team consisting of research scientists and research data engineers.

• Architect, design and build scalable data pipelines from the ground up, e.g. for downloading and preparing multimodal unstructured data for training.

• Build on top of a modern tech stack incl. Kubernetes, Dask, Ray, etc., and make extensive use of actively developing open-source solutions, where needed debugging low level issues and potentially submitting fixes to upstream.

• Deploy complex Python data solutions to cloud infrastructure, incl. AWS and company data centers (on prem) where you will own operation of data processing at massive scale.

• Go beyond “Big Data” and ETL. You will engineer and operate large scale data solutions for real-world unstructured data incl. text, code, image and audio modalities.

• Collaborate with stakeholders, research scientists, other research data engineers and data tooling and platform teams.

• Raise the standard for excellence and act as owner and champion for the quality and availability of our foundation model training data.

• Ensure mission-critical reliability of data pipeline jobs, maintain high quality code with documentation and provide a great data product user experience.
  

• Degree in a scientific or technical field.

• Previous work experience as Data Engineer or a similar data- and engineering-centric role in a scaled-up tech company with a focus on large-scale unstructured data.

• Extensive experience with large scale data engineering writing high quality Python code and leveraging the full Python data ecosystem in cloud deployments.

• Exploratory data analysis, data cleaning, data validation, ideally ML feature engineering for text and other unstructured data.

• Developing, testing and deploying data pipelines and infrastructure

• End-to-end ownership of data solution development, operations, testing and quality assurance, ideally responsibility for data products.

• Experience with distributed computing and parallelization for Python like Dask, Celery and Ray in combination with infrastructure-as-code, ideally Kubernetes on AWS.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in an English-speaking organization.

Ideally, you have domain-specific experiences:

• LLM training data preparation.

• NLP, text classification, model-based/GPU workflows.

• Dynamic workflow orchestration frameworks like Argo Workflows.

• Linguistics expertise or speaking multiple languages.

• Fluent in an additional high-performance programming language like C++, Go or Rust.

• Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities. We're more than just colleagues; we're a group of professionals with a shared mission to connect diverse cultures. Our global presence is growing–we've doubled in size nearly every year, with our employees based in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the US, and Japan, and we continue to expand our network.

• Open communication, regular feedback: as a language-focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication. We value smooth collaboration, direct and actionable feedback, and believe that leading with empathy and growth mindset makes us better together.

• Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week. This allows you to engage directly with your team and experience the unique energy of our workspace, while still enjoying the flexibility and comfort of working from home. With flexible working hours and trust in your productivity, we are in sync with your team’s general locations and time zones to foster effective and seamless collaboration.

• Regular in-person team events: we bond over vibrant events that are as unique as our team, from local team and business unit gatherings, to new-joiner onboardings, to company-wide events that bring us all together–literally.

• Monthly full-day hacking sessions: every month, we have Hack Fridays, where you can spend your time diving into a project you're passionate about and get the opportunity to work with other teams–we value your initiatives, impact, and creativity.

• 30 days of annual leave: we value your peace of mind. With 30 days off (excluding public holidays) and access to mental health resources, we make sure you're as strong mentally as you are professionally.

• Competitive benefits: just as our team spans the globe, so does our benefits package. We've crafted it to reflect the diversity of our team and tailored it to align with your unique location, to ensure you feel supported every step of the way.

If this role and our mission resonate with you, but you're hesitant because you don't check all the boxes, don't let that hold you back. At DeepL, it's all about the value you bring and the growth we can foster together. Go ahead, apply—let's discover your potential together. We can't wait to meet you!

You are welcome at DeepL for who you are—we appreciate authenticity here. Our product is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all succeed, contribute, and think forward! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our diversity that we will find the power to break down language barriers in the world.