Limited employment up to 6 months (f/m/d) - Neuro-Symbolic AI: The Next Frontier (6 Months)

Research Fellow – Global Content Group (GCG) Engineering Team

As a Research Fellow in the Global Content Group (GCG) Engineering team, you will:

• Research and prototype neuro-symbolic AI approaches that combine the reasoning power of structured knowledge graphs with the generalization capabilities of large language and foundation models
• Develop methods to inject ontology-level knowledge — concepts, relationships, and constraints — directly into foundation models, enabling them to generate accurate, schema‑aware SPARQL queries from natural language
• Design and evaluate knowledge‑grounded question answering (Q&A) systems that go beyond retrieval‑augmented generation, leveraging formal ontologies to improve precision, explainability, and faithfulness of model outputs
• Benchmark your approaches against existing text‑to‑SPARQL and semantic Q&A baselines on enterprise knowledge graphs
• Collaborate with a global team of software engineers, data scientists, and researchers on cutting‑edge challenges at the intersection of symbolic AI and modern deep learning
• Document and present your research findings, contributing to publications and internal knowledge‑sharing

What You Bring

• PhD candidate (mid‑to‑late stage) or postdoctoral researcher in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, or a related field
• Strong background in neuro‑symbolic AI, knowledge representation, or semantic web technologies (RDF, OWL, SPARQL)
• Hands‑on experience with large language models or foundation models — fine‑tuning, prompt engineering, or knowledge injection techniques
• Familiarity with text‑to‑SPARQL, semantic parsing, or knowledge graph question answering (KGQA)
• Solid programming skills in Python; experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, Hugging Face) and knowledge graph tooling is a plus
• Research track record in neuro‑symbolic systems, NLP, or knowledge graphs — with publications
• Ability to drive independent research and translate findings into working prototypes
• Good communication skills in English (written and spoken); German is a plus
• Available for a 6‑month research fellowship (full‑time or part‑time)

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. SAP is committed to the values of Equal Employment Opportunity and provides accessibility accommodations to applicants with physical or mental disabilities.