Research Assistant (Platform Engineer)

Interested applicants are invited to apply directly at the NUS Career Portal. Please note your application will only be processed if you apply via NUS Career Portal.

NUS Career Portal link - https://careers.nus.edu.sg/job/Research-Assistant-%28Platform-Engineer%29/34334-en_GB/

We regret that only shortlisted candidates will be notified.

Job Description

The National University of Singapore invites applications for the position of Research Assistant (Platform Engineer) for Horizons Office, School of Computing (SoC). This role is strongly committed to research excellence in all its dimensions: searching for fundamental results and insights, developing novel computational solutions to a wide range of applications, building large-scale experimental systems and improving the well-being of society.

We are building an AI-powered research platform, which requires a platform engineer to help build and operate the infrastructure that keeps our backend, data, and AI systems reliable and scalable. The successful candidate will work closely with the Principal Investigator and lab members on one or more research projects, owning the platform that researchers depend on to run experiments, process data, and deploy AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and operate backend services, databases, workers, and AI infrastructure.
• Build and improve reliable infrastructure for data processing and distributed workloads.
• Optimize PostgreSQL performance, backups, and reliability.
• Improve monitoring, logging, deployment, and production reliability.
• Contribute to backend services and internal tooling where needed.
• Work closely with the Principal Investigator and lab members to support research projects, turning experimental workflows into robust, reproducible pipelines.
• Support research activities such as running experiments, data collection and processing, and documenting systems and results.

Only shortlisted candidates will be notified.

Job Requirements

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a relevant discipline.
• At least 3 years of relevant work experience in platform, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering roles.
• Strong experience with Linux, Docker, infrastructure as code, and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure).”
• Experience operating production services, databases, distributed jobs, and observability systems.
• Ability to diagnose performance and reliability issues across the stack.
• Experience or strong interest in research, in areas such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Programming Languages & Software Engineering, or large-scale experimental systems.
• Pragmatic and comfortable working across boundaries in a small, early-stage team.

Nice to Have

• Python and PostgreSQL development experience.
• Experience with Redis, queues, or distributed processing.
• Experience operating AI-powered applications or data pipelines.
• Experience with vector databases, embeddings, search, or RAG systems.
• Prior research experience, publications, or contributions to open-source research tooling.