Director AI R&D

Aleph Alpha Research’s mission is to deliver category-defining AI innovation that enables open, accessible, and trustworthy deployment of GenAI in industrial applications. Our organization develops foundational models and next-generation methods that make it easy and affordable for Aleph Alpha’s customers to increase productivity in development, engineering, logistics, and manufacturing processes.

As a Director of AI R&D at Aleph Alpha (f/m/d), you manage, co‑own and help drive the engineering and science excellence bar across a major section of our large‑scale foundation model development lifecycle — such as pre‑training, post‑training, or a dedicated capability‑oriented R&D domain (e.g. explainability, controllability, or efficiency).

You will contribute to defining and executing the research and engineering scope for your area - empowering highly autonomous teams to deliver world‑class models and methods with scientific rigor, operational excellence, and organizational clarity.

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.

Your responsibilities

• Manage one or more AI R&D teams focusing on a model lifecycle stage (e.g. pretraining, post training, or an exploratory research domain).

• Serve as a line manager responsible for the growth, motivation, and performance of researchers and engineers across various IC levels.

• Co‑own the technical and scientific direction for your area — balancing mid-term exploration with near-term delivery.

• Uphold and propagate Aleph Alpha’s cultural principles of autonomy, ownership, and peer accountability.

• Partner with other Directors and Principal ICs to ensure architectural coherence, infrastructure readiness, and effective collaboration across R&D domains.

• Contribute technically to select work-streams (e.g. scaling and efficiency studies, reinforcement learning, evaluation pipelines, or capability alignment).

• Drive organizational efficiency - ensuring clear goals, minimal blockers, and consistent communication between teams and leadership.

• Represent your teams’ work within and outside Aleph Alpha, sharing insights and progress with internal stakeholders and the broader research community.

Your profile

• Strong background in managing AI research or ML engineering teams engaged in model development, training, or optimization at scale.

• Proven technical expertise in one or more of the following: LLM pre-training (data and compute optimization), post‑training (fine‑tuning, reinforcement learning, evaluation), emerging GenAI research areas (e.g. safety, compute efficiency), or other areas of machine learning.

• Ability to nurture highly autonomous contributors while maintaining strategic coherence and scientific excellence.

• Experience translating research goals into clear, achievable execution plans.

• Excellent interpersonal skills and a collaborative mindset suited to a peer‑driven, low‑hierarchy environment.

• Skilled in balancing hands‑on technical engagement with effective people and project leadership.

• Willingness to regularly work from our Heidelberg or Berlin hubs to collaborate closely with teams.

Preferred qualifications

• Strong leadership mindset and skill that aligns well with the teal organization setup at Aleph Alpha

• PhD or comparable research experience in machine learning, computer science, or related technical field.

• Record of contributions to state-of-the-art model training methods.

• Demonstrated success in building or scaling high-performing teams in a research‑driven environment.

• Commitment to fostering team diversity and developing future technical leaders.

What we offer

• Become part of an AI revolution!

• 30 days of paid vacation

• Access to a variety of fitness & wellness offerings via Wellhub

• Mental health support through 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

• Virtual Stock Option Plan

• JobRad® Bike Lease