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%2C-AIDF/32756-en_GB/?st=BD8F2386B95AB305694B9831B8D9A9D7485C2962

We regret that only shortlisted candidates will be notified.

Background

The Asian Institute of Digital Finance (AIDF) is a university-level institute in NUS, jointly founded by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the National Research Foundation (NRF) and NUS. AIDF aspires to be a thought leader, a Fintech knowledge hub, and an experimental site for developing digital financial technologies as well as for nurturing current and future Fintech researchers and practitioners in Asia. The Credit Research Initiative (CRI) is a non-profit undertaking under the AIDF. Pioneering the "public good" credit risk measures, the initiative is committed to advancing big data analytics and providing directly useful credit intelligence to academic and professional communities.

Moreover, AIDF-CRI is dedicated to staying updated with the latest trends and technologies, especially for AI and LLMs. We are currently in the process of productionizing a few AI-driven application systems to enhance and diversify our existing solutions and workflows. This includes redesigning, testing, and improving both the frontend and backend framework.

Responsibilities

AIDF-CRI is actively seeking candidates with a deep passion for AI research and engineering. The selected candidate will explore and develop cutting-edge AI technologies from rapid paper-to-prototype implementations to turning promising ideas into high-impact demos. The selected candidate will also play a key role in transforming an existing AI-powered application prototype into a fully commercial product by upgrading our prototype to a professional, market-ready level that delivers an exceptional user experience.

Particularly, the responsibilities will include:

• Research & ExplorationRead and distill state-of-the-art papers; identify promising ideas and open gaps.Design small, clean experiments to validate hypotheses; write concise research memos.

• Modeling & PrototypingImplement and adapt recent methods (e.g., LoRA/QLoRA finetuning, DPO/RLHF variants, agent frameworks, diffusion or vision-language modules).Build high-quality prototypes and reproducible baselines (datasets, training scripts, eval harnesses).

• Backend & Frontend DevelopmentDesign, develop, and maintain scalable and secure backend systems, focusing on performance, reliability, and security.Develop RESTful APIs based on feature requirements to better integrate LLM powered components into the system.Design and develop scalable services to support various features, managing asynchronous tasks and handling varying request volumes from multiple services.Develop and implement responsive user interfaces based on provided UI/UX designs, ensuring a seamless user experience across devices and browsers.

• Optimization & TestingImplement and maintain unit, integration, and end-to-end tests to ensure system reliability and resilience.Collaborate with the QA team to design test plans and participate in user acceptance testing (UAT) to ensure features are fully functional before release.

• Team CollaborationCollaborate with AI engineers, and other stakeholders to ensure seamless integration of frontend and backend logics with AI-driven services.Maintain comprehensive documentation of backend processes, system architecture, and database schema to promote knowledge sharing and ensure smooth onboarding for new team members.

Minimum Requirements

• Preferably major in the areas of computer science/engineering or similar discipline.
• Strong with at least 1 programming languages (e.g., Python, Java, Golang, JavaScript, TypeScript), and solid software practices (e.g., Git, virtual env, testing mindset)
• Hands-on experience with at least one of: LLM prompting/finetuning (LoRA/QLoRA), RAG or vector search, multimodal (vision-language) pipelines, or agentic workflows/tools.
• Familiar with web application development and experience in a modern web framework (e.g Django, FastAPI, SpringBoot, Gin)
• Knowledge of frontend development techniques and familiar with a modern web framework (e.g. React, Vue or Next.js, Remix).
• Understanding of RESTful APIs design principles and practice.
• Experience working with relational and non-relational database servers, including MySQL and MongoDB, is highly desirable.
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes and Redis.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues effectively.
• Excellent communication and documentation skills, both written and verbal, to collaborate effectively with team members and stakeholders.

Bonus Skills

• Efficiency & Serving: vLLM/TGI, quantization (AWQ/GPTQ/LLM.int8), batch/kv-cache tuning, Triton or CUDA basics.
• Evaluation: lm-eval-harness/HELM/Ragas, red-teaming, robustness testing, dataset curation.
• Safety & Trustworthiness: hallucination detection, uncertainty estimation, censorship/PII filtering, policy + guardrails.
• Data/Retrieval: FAISS/Milvus/pgvector, RAG design, chunking strategies, embedding selection.
• Frameworks/Libs: Hugging Face ecosystem, LangChain/LlamaIndex, Ray.
• Experience with state management libraries like Redux or Vuex.
• Familiarity with modern build tools (Webpack, Vite) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Exposure to cloud services like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud for backend deployment.