Research Assistant (Backend & 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-%28Backend-&-Platform-Engineer%29/34363-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 (Backend & 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 and are seeking a Backend & Platform Engineer to help build and operate the backend and infrastructure systems that make it reliable and scalable. The successful candidate will work closely with the Principal Investigator and lab members on one or more research projects, building the services, data pipelines, and infrastructure that researchers depend on to ingest data, run experiments, and deploy AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and operate backend services, databases, workers, and AI infrastructure.
• Help build and improve data ingestion, processing, and matching workflows.
• Optimize PostgreSQL schemas, queries, migrations, backups, and performance.
• Make agent and ingestion jobs durable, recoverable, and safe across multiple workers.
• Contribute to Python backend services and internal tools where needed.
• Improve monitoring, logging, reliability, and production performance.
• Work closely with the Principal Investigator and lab members to support research projects, turning experimental workflows into robust, reproducible backend systems.
• 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 experience in backend, platform, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering roles.
• Strong experience with Python, PostgreSQL, Linux, Docker, infrastructure as code, and at least one major cloud platform (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Comfortable working across backend systems, databases, and infrastructure.
• Experience with distributed jobs, queues, Redis, and observability.
• Experience developing or operating AI-powered applications or 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 approach suited to a small, early-stage team.

Nice to Have

• Experience with data ingestion pipelines, external data sources, data processing, or data matching.
• Experience with vector databases, embeddings, search, or RAG systems.
• Prior research experience, publications, or contributions to open-source research tooling.