Senior Research Engineer LLM

At Flanders Make, we conduct research aimed at innovation in the (manufacturing) industry of the future. In upcoming projects, we want to develop prototype software tools that use state-of-the-art language processing.

As a senior LLM Researcher at Flanders Make, you will use your expertise in LLMs to combine state-of-the-art large language techniques with explicitly modelled context of knowledge graphs.

Development and Implementation of AI Solutions for the Manufacturing Industry

You will be working in an agile environment in which you will work together with experts from a software, mechanical or mathematical engineering background with expertise in model-driven engineering, computational design synthesis, optimization techniques and mechatronic design.

Together, you will play a significant role in creating full-stack software that will, among other things, radically accelerate searches by service engineers and data scientists in manufacturing companies. The aim is to arrive at different versions of proof-of-concept solutions.

Specifically, you will:

• Develop Python tools for prompt engineering, test SotA RAG techniques, perform data processing and design multi-agent collaboration frameworks;
• Setup Graph-RAG and other hybrid retrieval solutions;
• Test proof-of-concept tool versions on Flanders Make's extensive internal (data) infrastructure, as well as externally on real business cases;
• Regularly present the progress of your technical concepts and findings to various stakeholders at colleagues and partners;
• Actively expand your expertise in this rapidly developing field but also in related topics.

Creative Problem Solver with LLM expertise

As a senior LLM researcher, you are:

• Experienced in creating advanced RAG and agentic solutions;
• Experienced in creating data ingestion techniques relevant to RAG pipelines, such as advanced chunking, metadata enrichment and multi-format ingestion;
• Familiar with agile software development, either on an industrial level or on the applied research level (bridging the gap between industry and research);
• Willing to constantly learn new techniques, technologies, and skills, and keep up to date with the latest academic and industry research trends involving LLMs;
• Good at communicating your innovative results to both industrial and academic stakeholders.

PROFILE

This is what you bring with you:

• Extensive background in programming, mainly in Python;
• Knowledge and background in the latest RAG and agentic technologies, including hybrid and multi-hop retrieval, adaptive, multimodal and Graph RAG, re-ranking, stateful agent graphs and long-horizon reasoning;
• Experience with R&D, mainly in LLMs/AI;
• Conceptual thinker with insight in formalizing concepts;
• Good communication and listening skills, customer-oriented and a team player;
• A background in knowledge graphs is a plus but not required.

OUR OFFER

• A challenging job working with experts in various fields on real industrial problems;
• The opportunity to work with innovative companies active in Flanders;
• The opportunity to work with national and international research institutes;
• A warm, enthusiastic and international first-class colleagues;
• An open-minded and flexible working environment;
• An attractive salary with fringe benefits.
• Flanders Make colleagues work together on projects in Belgium from our sites in Kortrijk, Lommel and Leuven (flexible workplace policy).

Job details

Title: Senior Research Engineer LLM

Employer: Flanders Make

Location: Gaston Geenslaan 8, 3001 Leuven Heverlee, Belgium

Published: 2026-03-14

Application deadline: 2026-07-11 23:59 (Europe/Brussels)

Job type: Engineer

Field: Information Systems, Industrial Engineering, Computational Sciences, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Programming Languages