PhD position Tool-Augmented LLMs for Enterprise Data AI
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Monthly Salary:
Posted on:
19 hours ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Job Summary
Mission
Industry hire at Aily Labs academic PhD supervision at EURECOM (Prof. Paolo Papotti)
Enterprises are turning to LLMs for high-stakes data-driven decisions over structured data such as databases and knowledge graphs. This PhD sets a three-year agenda to build and validate thinking-with-tools an approach where the model embeds live tool use (e.g. SQL/SPARQL Python) inside its reasoning. Beyond accuracy gains the goal is an efficient decision system that knows when its unsure asks for clarification and escalates when judgment matters. Consider the question: If we cut Product Xs price by 5% next quarter what revenue should we expect the system reasons pulls the right numbers exposes its assumptions and invites a human to confirm or adjust when needed. This aligns with broader research priorities on human-AI decision support and governance in complex settings.
We will keep an open comparative stance: tool-augmented reasoning is a promising solution not a foregone conclusion. A core part of the PhD is to demonstrate on company data and realistic scenarios when it surpasses agentic pipelines (LLMs orchestrating tools step-by-step) in terms of quality of the solutions efficiency costs and their trade-offs.
You will design the framework fine-tune open LLMs to plan and run safe efficient tools and develop policies that balance accuracy cost and latency. This includes building a sandbox reflecting enterprise schemas; craft training traces that interleave reasoning and tool calls; and prototype realistic Aily Labs use cases (e.g. forecasting and customer insights).
Examples of possible research outcomes are: a cost-aware reasoning optimizer that learns when/how to invoke tools; typed auditable traces and human-in-the-loop mechanisms (uncertainty clarification escalation); and budget-aware routing that adapts across schemas and tasks. Impact will be measured with clear evaluations of accuracy/latency/cost trade-offs robustness to schema evolution and governance considerations.
Environment.In this industrial PhD youll be hired by Aily Labs and embedded with product/data teams in Barcelona/Madrid (Spain) while enrolled at EURECOM under Prof. Paolo Papotti supervision. Duration 36 months; working language English.
Your profile
Strong background in ML/NLP and databases (SQL/DBMS/KGs); solid Python and experimentation. Experience with LLM fine-tuning text-to-SQL tool use/agents or RL is a plus.
How to apply.Send a CV transcripts a short research statement (1 page) and representative publications/software (e.g. GitHub) to (cc and ). Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.
Who are we
- We are an internationally diverse and dynamic team with more than 30 nationalities.
- We are hybrid 2 days a week in office.
- We develop high-quality beautiful software and thus create sustainable added value for our customers.
- We live an open feedback culture so that we can constantly reflect and improve.
About us
Required Experience:
Intern
Key Skills
- SAP BusinessObjects
- Enterprise Architecture
- Hybris
- SAP HANA
- SAP
- TOGAF
- Solution Architecture
- Cloud Architecture
- SAP BW 4HANA
- Salesforce
- SAP S/4HANA
- SAP ERP
