About the Role
DeepL is a global AI product and research company focused on building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems. Over 200,000 business customers and millions of individuals across 228 global markets today trust DeepL's Language AI platform for human-like translation, improved writing and real-time voice translation. DeepL continues to expand its offerings beyond the field of Language, including DeepL Agent - an autonomous AI assistant designed to transform the way businesses and knowledge workers get work done. Our Language AI teams form the foundation of DeepL's success. We are a dedicated group of researchers who collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and designers. Our mission is to build the world's leading language AI system to deliver perfect translations for the most demanding use cases. We take responsibility for the entire life cycle of the machine learning models that power our language AI products, including data, training, quality assurance, and operational aspects. We're looking for a Staff Research Scientist to lead scientific innovation for our core text translation products. This is a high-impact, hands-on role for a research leader who can define long-term scientific strategy, prototype rapidly, run large-scale experiments, and drive breakthroughs all the way into production. In this competitive and highly dynamic field, you will be responsible to solve the foundational challenges that will keep us at the forefront of what is possible.
Responsibilities
- Lead hands-on research and development or our core text translation products.
- Drive innovation on methods relevant to achieving perfect translation quality as well as translation quality estimation and evaluation.
- Design, train, and optimize large-scale, LLM-based translation models for multilingual accuracy, context awareness, robustness, and varying latency demands.
- Own the full lifecycle of model delivery: prototyping, ablations, training, evaluation, optimization, and production deployment.
- Work closely with engineering teams to integrate models into real-time systems, ensuring reliability, uptime, and quality at scale.
- Drive improvements in inference efficiency, model serving, voice UX, and robustness to real-world acoustic conditions.
- Establish strong practices for evaluation, reproducibility, monitoring, and continuous model improvement in production.
- Mentor researchers and engineers, promote hands-on collaboration, and raise the bar for model quality and operational excellence.
Requirements
- Deep expertise in foundations and application of machine translation.
- A hands-on builder who enjoys training models, running experiments, debugging pipelines, and integrating ML systems into production.
- Experience shipping ML models to production, maintaining them at scale, and working with engineers on deployment, monitoring, and serving.
- Ability to lead complex research efforts while staying grounded in product impact, user experience, and real-world performance.
- Strong coding and experimentation skills (Python, PyTorch/JAX, audio processing libraries).
- Ability to communicate clearly, collaborate across teams, and align research work with product and engineering priorities.
- Proven experience mentoring others and elevating technical quality across a fast-moving, applied research team.
Benefits
- Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities. We're more than just colleagues; we're a group of professionals with a shared mission to connect diverse cultures. Our global presence is growing–we've doubled in size nearly every year, with our employees based in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the US, and Japan, and we continue to expand our network.
- Open communication, regular feedback: as a language-focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication. We value smooth collaboration, direct and actionable feedback, and believe that leading with empathy and growth mindset makes us better together.
- Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week. This allows you to engage directly with your team and experience the unique energy of our workspace, while still enjoying the flexibility and comfort of working from home. With flexible working hours and trust in your productivity, we are in sync with your team’s general locations and time zones to foster effective and seamless collaboration.
- Virtual Shares - An ownership mindset in every role. We believe everyone should share in our success, and that’s why every employee receives Virtual Shares, linking your contribution directly to DeepL’s growth and rewarding you with a stake in our future.
- Regular in-person team events: we bond over vibrant events that are as unique as our team, from local team and business unit gatherings, to new-joiner onboardings, to company-wide events that bring us all together–literally.
- Monthly full-day hacking sessions: every month, we have Hack Fridays, where you can spend your time diving into a project you're passionate about and get the opportunity to work with other teams–we value your initiatives, impact, and creativity.
- 30 days of annual leave: we value your peace of mind. With 30 days off (excluding public holidays) and access to mental health resources, we make sure you're as strong mentally as you are professionally.
- Competitive benefits: just as our team spans the globe, so does our benefits package. We've crafted it to reflect the diversity of our team and tailored it to align with your unique location, to ensure you feel supported every step of the way.