Applied Researcher – Software Engineering & AI

Role

You will perform applied research at the intersection of software engineering, program analysis, and industrial practice. You will work with industrial partners (e.g., ASML, Canon, Philips, Vanderlande) following the “industry as a lab” principle: real systems, real constraints, and results that get used. Your work will focus on technologies for software maintenance and evolution of large codebases, including program comprehension, reverse engineering, refactoring, migration, and AI-assisted techniques.

What you will do

You will:

• Prototype and evaluate methods and tools for program analysis and program comprehension (e.g., static analysis, parsing, lightweight modeling).
• Extract and formalize models from software artifacts (source code, build pipelines, logs, technical documentation) to support migration and refactoring decisions.
• Prototype and evaluate engineering‑assistant concepts that support software analysis, modernization, migration, or refactoring using program‑analysis, retrieval, knowledge‑based, and generative‑AI techniques.
• Work in multidisciplinary project teams and co‑create solutions with industrial engineers; present results in workshops and project reviews.
• Contribute to research outputs such as technical reports, internal tooling, scientific publications, and conference presentations.

Focus areas

• Program comprehension and reverse engineering
• Refactoring and software migration
• Program‑analysis techniques, models, and knowledge representations
• AI‑assisted methods for software comprehension and modernization

Technical context

Typical environment: existing industrial assets in languages like C++, C#, and Python on Windows and Linux. You will help teams move towards more maintainable architectures, tooling, and workflows.

Eisen

• What you bring
• MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Programming
  Languages, or a related field
• Hands-on programming skills and the ability to work with (and improve)
  existing codebases; experience with at least one of C++, C#, Java, or
  Python
• Experience in program analysis, compilers, language engineering, reverse
  engineering, software modernization, or AI-assisted software engineering
• Ability to communicate clearly with both researchers and engineers;
  comfortable presenting results and recommendations
• Team mindset and ownership: you collaborate, deliver, and iterate based on
  feedback and project constraints
• Experience with compiler tooling, language workbenches, or code-query
  frameworks (e.g. LLVM/Clang, Roslyn, ANTLR, tree-sitter)
• Experience applying static analysis, intelligent parsing, or lightweight
  modeling to extract structure from source code and documentation
• Experience building research prototypes in Python and transitioning them
  into maintainable internal tooling
• Knowledge of software engineering processes in industry (CI/CD, testing
  strategy, architecture, system engineering)
• Experience with AI-assisted software-engineering approaches, such as
  retrieval-augmented generation, code and documentation analysis, evaluation
  of AI outputs, human-in-the-loop validation, or knowledge-graph-based
  context management

Vul je gegevens hieronder in, dan nemen we binnen 2 uur contact met je op om samen te kijken of er een match is. Heb je nog vragen? Bel ons op 030-249 66 96 of stuur een e-mail naar We helpen je graag verder!