Applications are invited for a PhD position at the IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid, Spain.
The successful candidates will work under the co-supervision of Thaleia Dimitra Doudali and Marco Guarnieri.
The dissertation aims to design and implement secure, efficient, and trustworthy infrastructure for deploying and serving LLMs and ML models at scale. Key challenges include protecting model integrity and user data during inference, mitigating side-channel and prompt injection attacks, ensuring secure multi-tenancy, and leveraging trusted execution environments or other hardware-based security primitives. The dissertation will also explore trade-offs between performance, scalability, and security in real-world serving environments, with an emphasis on practical deployments.
Who should apply?
The position requires good programming and problem solving skills and proficiency in spoken and written English. A background on machine learning and operating systems (course work, coding experience etc.) is highly desirable.
Working at IMDEA Software
The IMDEA Software Institute is ranked among the best European research institutes in computer science. The institute provides an internationally competitive stipend and support for research related travel. The working language at the institute is English. Knowledge of Spanish is not required.
Dates
The position will cover the whole duration of the doctoral studies. The starting date is October 2025. Deadline for applications is August 8th, 2025. Review of applications will begin immediately, and continue until the position is filled.
How to apply?
Applicants interested in the position should submit their application at https://careers.software.imdea.org/ selecting option PhD student and reference code 2025-07-phd-secureml.
The recruitment process will comply with the IMDEA Software Institute’s OTM-R Policy.
For any questions about these positions, please contact Thaleia Dimitra Doudali directly ().