Faculty of Law, Center for Legal Data Science
Research Assistant / Master's Student in Computer Science or Data Science 50 %
Start of employment as soon as possible / by mutual agreement, fixed-term until 31 July 2027The Center for Legal Data Science (CLDS) is an interdisciplinary research hub at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich. The core task of the CLDS is the application, critical reflection and promotion of data science methods in national and international legal contexts. The CLDS pursues the following high-level goals:
- advancing legal knowledge and legal knowledge production through the application of quantitative and computational methods,
- enhancing the transparency of law and legal procedures through the application of data science methods,
- facilitating interdisciplinary legal research and teaching involving quantitative, computational and empirical methods, nationally and internationally.
More information about the CLDS can be found at www.clds.uzh.ch.
Your responsibilities
As a member of the CLDS team, you will contribute to the technical development and evaluation of the Zurich Legal LLM project. Your responsibilities may include:
We offer varied and interesting work in an inspiring and socially relevant environment. Diversity and inclusion are important to us.
In particular, we offer:
- supporting the design, implementation and documentation of a controlled RAG pipeline for Swiss legal materials,
- preparing, cleaning and structuring legal teaching materials for retrieval-based use,
- implementing document ingestion, chunking, embedding, retrieval and citation-tracking workflows,
- testing and comparing open-weights LLMs and selected commercial systems under controlled conditions,
- implementing guardrails against content leakage, excessive quotation and extraction-style prompting,
- supporting the development of a benchmark suite for doctrinal Q&A, exam-style legal reasoning and structured objection-response drafts,
- contributing to automatic evaluation workflows, including faithfulness checks, citation precision, retrieval quality and structure compliance,
- maintaining technical documentation, experiment logs and reproducible code,
- assisting with the development of an internal teaching-oriented prototype for faculty use, including exam-question generation and response-drafting workflows,
- collaborating with legal researchers, student assistants and faculty members in an interdisciplinary project environment.
We offer varied and interesting work in an inspiring and socially relevant environment. Diversity and inclusion are important to us.
In particular, we offer:
- a challenging applied research position in a motivated and interdisciplinary team,
- the opportunity to contribute to a strategic AI project at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich,
- hands-on experience with RAG systems, LLM evaluation, legal NLP and AI governance,
- close collaboration with legal scholars and data scientists,
- the possibility to contribute to academic publications and internal faculty prototypes,
- flexible working hours compatible with Master's studies,
- the possibility of working partly from home,
- experience in building AI infrastructure for concrete research and teaching use cases.
Your profile
The following qualifications are required:
- ongoing Master's studies, or recently completed Master's degree, in computer science, data science, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, software engineering or a related quantitative field,
- good programming skills in Python,
- familiarity with machine learning, natural language processing or information retrieval,
- interest in Large Language Models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation and applied AI systems,
- ability to work carefully with structured and unstructured text data,
- good written and oral knowledge of English,
- motivation to work in an interdisciplinary environment at the interface of law, data science and AI governance.
- experience with RAG frameworks, vector databases, graph RAGs, embedding models or LLM APIs,
- experience with open-weights LLMs and local or controlled model deployment,
- familiarity with tools such as LangChain, Hugging Face, Ollama, or similar systems,
- experience with evaluation of LLM outputs, benchmarking, prompt engineering or hallucination/faithfulness testing,
- experience with document processing workflows for PDF, DOCX, Markdown or OCR-based pipelines,
- basic knowledge of German, especially for working with Swiss legal teaching materials,
- interest in legal data science, empirical legal research or AI governance.
Information on your application
Applicants are requested to submit their application documents (ideally as one single PDF), including:- motivation letter,
- CV,
- transcript of records,
- copies of certificates,
- if available: code samples, GitHub profile, thesis, project report or other evidence of relevant technical work.
What we offer
Our employees benefit from a wide range of attractive offers. Find out more: https://www.uzh.ch/de/explore/work.html.
What we offer
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Further information
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Prof. Dr. Tilmann Altwicker Chair holder
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Working at UZH
The University of Zurich, Switzerland's largest university, offers a range of attractive positions in various subject areas and professional fields. With around 10,000 employees and currently 12 professional apprenticeship streams the University offers an inspiring working environment on cutting-edge research and top-class education. Put your talent and skills to work with us. Find out more about UZH as an employer!
More → https://www.uzh.ch/en/explore/work.html
Please apply via our job portal www.jobs.uzh.ch.
The University of Zurich, Switzerland's largest university, offers a range of attractive positions in various subject areas and professional fields. With around 10,000 employees and currently 12 professional apprenticeship streams the University offers an inspiring working environment on cutting-edge research and top-class education. Put your talent and skills to work with us. Find out more about UZH as an employer!
More → https://www.uzh.ch/en/explore/work.html
Please apply via our job portal www.jobs.uzh.ch.
Working at UZH
The University of Zurich, Switzerland's largest university, offers a range of attractive positions in various subject areas and professional fields. With around 10,000 employees and currently 12 professional apprenticeship streams the University offers an inspiring working environment on cutting-edge research and top-class education. Put your talent and skills to work with us. Find out more about UZH as an employer!
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