AI/ML Researcher

About YLAB

We build the AI we would give our own children.

Children are growing up with AI today. We make sure this AI sparks curiosity instead of addiction, is safe instead of data-hungry, and is built for children instead of adults.

We are YLAB, a small AI lab from Köln-Ehrenfeld. We develop software and hardware from one source, from the language model to the housing. Our first product is Onoo, a screen-free learning companion for children from age four. Onoo asks questions back, lets children guess, and thinks along. It has no camera and no display, shows no advertising and sells no data.

Why YLAB

Your work ends up in the child's room, not in a dashboard.

Software & Hardware: AI, app, firmware and device come together with us. You see how code turns into something a child picks up and holds.

You work on real open questions, for example how AI understands children's voices and explains the world to five-year-olds.

Tech, pedagogy and research sit at one table with us.

Honesty over glossiness: we build a lot of things for the first time. If that excites you, we should talk.

What we offer

• Responsibility from day one: You get real topics and problems instead of tickets, and your decisions carry weight.

• Top work equipment: You work with the setup and tools you need.

• Flexible further education: Conference, course or workshop – you tell us what moves you forward.

• Hybrid with heart: Remote when you need quiet, and in the office when we tinker together.

About the role

How does a language model understand a four-year-old? And how does it explain the world to her without overwhelming her? There are hardly any papers and no benchmarks for this. That is exactly where you come in.

You are our first dedicated research position. You work at the intersection of AI, language and pedagogy, with real families instead of laboratory conditions, and with a direct line into the product.

What awaits you: open questions with substance, an advisory board from education and psychology, and the freedom to design studies the way they need to be.

How you can help us

• You design and conduct studies with children and families. From observation in the living room to structured testing.

• You build methods to evaluate age-appropriate answers: What does understandable mean, what does too much mean?

• You translate findings into model and product decisions, together with engineering and pedagogy.

• You keep an eye on research (Child-Computer Interaction, Speech, LLM evals) and bring in whatever moves us forward.

• You share what we learn. We don't research for the drawer.

Get in touch if:

• You have a research background, such as HCI, psychology, linguistics or ML.

• You have already done research with users, ideally with children.

• You can do both: analyze interviews and build clean metrics.

• You write clearly, for papers as well as for product decisions.

• You enjoy seeing your research in a prototype next week.

Probably not a fit if: you see research as an end in itself or need two years of lead time before something is testable.

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