Machine Learning Research Engineer | Seqera

Machine Learning Research Engineer

Location

Barcelona (Spain)

Department

Engineering

Position Type

Full-Time

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About Seqera

Seqera is on a mission to empower scientists and organizations to solve humanity's biggest challenges through data-driven science. As the company behind Nextflow and the Seqera Platform, we enable global enterprises, biotech innovators, academic institutions, and public sector organizations to scale complex data workflows with confidence.

About the role

We are hiring a Research Engineer to own the improvement loop for a research engine we are building on top of the Seqera Platform. You will build the data and evaluation flywheel from engine' own run data, and use it to post-train small, task-specific models that make it better at generating, ranking and running scientific ideas. You will work directly with our Founding Scientist and the engineers who own the application, on a small team that moves fast and ships to real scientists. This is an in-office role in Barcelona. The team is here, the whiteboards are here, and this is the kind of work that goes faster in the same room.

What You'll Do

• Design and build the evaluation suite that defines what "better" means for an autonomous research agent.

• Build the pipeline that turns messy, real-world run data from deployments into a training-ready corpus.

• Post-train small open-weight models — SFT, preference tuning, adapters — to beat frontier-API baselines on core tasks at lower cost and latency.

• Run repeated training cycles on evolving data.

• Participate in journal clubs, stay at the frontier of post-training specialized models.

• Own the Next-Gen roadmap with our Founding Scientist: what data unlocks what capability, and in what order.

About you

• You have post-trained open-weight language models — SFT and at least one preference-tuning method — and put the results in front of real users, not just in a notebook.

• You have retrained models on changing data more than once and have dealt with regression and forgetting in practice: replay, data mixing, adapter strategies, eval gating.

• You have built evaluation harnesses for a specific task, defined the metric yourself, and defended the result to someone sceptical.

• You work fluently in Python with the modern stack — PyTorch, transformers, TRL, PEFT, vLLM or their equivalents.

• Your open-source footprint speaks for you: substantive contributions to the tools above, or fine-tuned models on the Hub.

• You are an operator. When the pipeline you need does not exist, you build it. You are comfortable when the data, the tooling and the direction are all incomplete at the same time.

• You want to work in-office in Barcelona, or you are ready to move here.

Nice to have

• Computational biology, chemistry or pharma exposure.

• Familiarity with Nextflow or workflow orchestration.

• Experience evaluating agentic, multi-step, tool-using systems.

• Distillation or small-model specialisation from frontier models.

• Publications or technical reports in post-training or continual learning.

Don’t meet every single requirement? At Seqera, we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role and your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

What will you find working at Seqera?

• Flexible working hours.

• International working environment with more than 25 nationalities.

• Passionate & talented team.

• Continuous skills development.

• Team retreats and bonding activities.

• A culture where your opinion is valued and your decisions have a real impact on the industry.

• Excitement of a fast-growing startup in a constantly changing environment.

Great benefits