Research Engineer II – Trust Technologies

About the role

Nanyang Technological University’s National Centre for Research in Digital Trust is seeking a hands‑on Research Engineer to develop AI components for a national trust technology programme. The role is execution‑focused, covering end‑to‑end development of local large language model (LLM) systems, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), model fine‑tuning, NLP analytics and trustworthy AI controls.

Key responsibilities

• Build end‑to‑end local LLM/RAG pipelines for conversational analysis of large unstructured datasets.
• Fine‑tune and adapt LLM/NLP models using supervised fine‑tuning, LoRA/PEFT and benchmark against RAG/prompting baselines.
• Implement NLP capabilities such as entity extraction, resolution, relationship analysis and other project‑specific analytics.
• Develop backend APIs, integrate databases/vector stores, serve local models, manage GPU inference and containerised deployment.
• Implement access control, audit logging, traceable retrieval/output provenance, model isolation and human‑review workflows.
• Conduct systematic evaluation, security/robustness testing, error analysis, performance optimisation and regression testing.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, AI, engineering, data science, software engineering or related field with at least 4 years of relevant experience.
• Independent, execution‑oriented and methodical, able to deliver working technical components under tight timelines.

Required skills

• Strong Python programming.
• Experience with LLM/NLP development, RAG and model fine‑tuning (LoRA/PEFT).
• Proficiency in PyTorch and/or Hugging Face libraries.
• Working knowledge of Linux, Git, Docker and SQL.
• Experience with APIs, GPU inference, containerised deployment and vector databases.
• Familiarity with trustworthy AI/security controls is an advantage.