Research Engineer – Personalization & Long-Context Modeling in LLMs

About the role

Rakuten Asia, in partnership with Singapore's Economic Development Board (EDB) through the Industrial Postgraduate Programme (IPP), is hiring fresh PhD candidates to work on cutting‑edge research in personalization and long‑context modeling for large language models (LLMs). The position is permanent and based at our Singapore office.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop, and train PyTorch models for user‑adaptive, memory‑augmented LLMs.
• Collaborate with joint supervisors and EDB on large‑scale experiments and infrastructure sharing.
• Produce research deliverables including publications, open‑source prototypes, and scalable deployment frameworks.
• Contribute to benchmarking and prototyping systems that integrate retrieval, memory, and continual learning.

Required profile

• Fresh or entry‑level PhD candidate with a strong foundation in deep learning, machine learning, and natural language processing.
• Demonstrated hands‑on experience building and training neural models.
• Excellent engineering mindset and ability to work in a research‑driven environment.

Required skills

• PyTorch
• Deep Learning
• Machine Learning
• Natural Language Processing

What we offer

• Full sponsorship for postgraduate studies under the IPP.
• Permanent employment with Rakuten Asia upon successful PhD completion.
• Competitive salary of SGD 4,500‑6,000 per month.
• Access to shared research infrastructure, regular exchange with academic partners, and opportunities for publications.