Applied AI Engineer

Applied AI Engineer

Join the CropXR Data Engineering team and help build resilient, sustainable, climate‑adapted crops in an exciting collaboration between biologists, computational scientists, and software engineers.

CropXR is a Dutch public‑private research initiative focused on accelerating the development of climate‑resilient crops. By combining biology, data science, and computational methods, CropXR develops approaches to better understand and predict crop performance under changing environmental conditions.

A central component of CropXR is the Resilience Hub, a digital research infrastructure designed to integrate experimental, phenotypic, genomic, and environmental data to support data‑driven crop research. Within CropXR, the Meta Buddy project aims to develop an AI‑based assistant that helps researchers prepare, structure, and upload data and metadata to the Resilience Hub.

Meta Buddy is intended to support researchers in converting heterogeneous inputs (including publications, metadata spreadsheets, and conversational queries) to facilitate making their data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). We are seeking an Applied AI Engineer to contribute to the development of Meta Buddy.

The position focuses on the algorithmic and experimental aspects of AI system development, with an emphasis on evaluating and improving methods for practical use. This role is particularly suitable for someone who enjoys working at the interface of applied AI, scientific workflows, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

• Contribute to the core algorithmic development of Meta Buddy.
• Design and evaluate experiments involving large language models (LLMs), retrieval‑based approaches, agentic workflows, prompting strategies, and light‑weight model adaptation or fine‑tuning where relevant.
• Investigate how AI methods can support researchers in capturing, interpreting, and organizing metadata for submission to the Resilience Hub.
• Assess the performance of different models, workflows, and architectures for specific use cases.
• Help define technical requirements and contribute to project planning and coordination.
• Collaborate with researchers, software engineers, and external partners from different disciplines.
• Contribute to the iterative development of Meta Buddy through evaluation and user feedback.

• Experience applying large language models (LLMs) or related AI approaches to real‑world problems involving scientific or technical documents.
• Experience with structured information extraction from heterogeneous sources such as scientific publications, PDFs, spreadsheets, metadata tables, or semi‑structured text.
• A solid understanding of how to design workflows for extracting, normalizing, and structuring metadata using AI methods.
• Experience assessing the quality, reliability, and accuracy of AI systems, including the design of benchmarks, evaluation datasets, and performance metrics.
• A strong understanding of the strengths and limitations of language models, including issues such as hallucinations, uncertainty, reproducibility, and robustness.
• Good programming skills, particularly in Python.
• Experience working with machine learning and LLM tooling ecosystems, including frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX, or modern LLM orchestration and evaluation frameworks.
• The ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across disciplines.
• Experience in one or more of the following areas would be considered an advantage:
• Information extraction from scientific literature, metadata standards, or document understanding pipelines.
• Retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), agentic systems, or conversational AI.
• Fine‑tuning, adapting, or systematically evaluating transformer‑based models.
• Benchmark design, annotation workflows, or human‑in‑the‑loop evaluation.
• FAIR data practices or scientific data management.
• Bioinformatics, computational biology, plant sciences, or related domains.
• Working in interdisciplinary or research‑oriented environments.

Applicants who do not meet every requirement but believe they are a good fit for the position are encouraged to apply. Due to Dutch regulations, only candidates…