Research Associate/PhD Candidate in Building and Scaling Agentic AI in Organizations

Develop agentic AI solutions for organizational use cases together with our industry partners. Scale these solutions to multi-agent systems, cross-departmental workflows, and platform-spanning architectures, integrating them into enterprise systems while addressing questions around decentralized structures and control mechanisms. Implement governance aspects in practice, including roles, permissions, and oversight mechanisms. Experimentally evaluate your prototypes in real organizational settings and refine findings into generalizable design knowledge, supported by close collaboration with your supervisors. Publish your research in top journals and present at leading conferences. Contribute to innovative teaching and executive education formats, presenting your systems to decision-makers in corporations, SMEs, and international research institutions.

The Institute of Information Systems and Digital Business (IWI-HSG) has been conducting application- and design-oriented research at the interface between business and IT for more than 30 years. Within the institute, the research group of Prof. Dr. Jan Marco Leimeister investigates how digital technologies transform service delivery, work, and organizations and a focus on the Management of Agentic AI and GenAI in Organizations. "A place where knowledge is created" - As one of Europe's leading universities of economics and business administration, the University of St.Gallen (HSG), Switzerland, is committed to the education of over 10'000 students. The HSG is one of the largest employers in the region and provides an attractive and innovative environment for more than 3'500 researchers, educators and professional staff.

• Excellent master's degree with a grade point average of at least 5.0 (min. 2.0 in Germany/Austria or equivalent) in (Business) Informatics, (Business) Engineering, Data Science, or Business Administration with technical depth

• Strong software engineering skills: fluent in Python, write production-quality code, and are comfortable with Git, APIs, containerization (e.g., Docker), and cloud environments

• Experience with building LLM-based and agentic systems, e.g. with agent frameworks and SDKs (LangChain/LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK), tool use and function calling, RAG pipelines and interoperability protocols (MCP, A2A)

• Solid understanding of organisational contexts: business processes, organisational structures, and IT investment economics. Comfortable discussing architecture with engineers and value/risk with department heads

• Interest in agentic AI: Who is accountable when agents act, how permissions and oversight are designed across departments and platforms, and what it takes to move from pilot to scaled, governed deployment

• Curiosity and ambition to contribute to research through your systems; prior experience in academic writing is a plus

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English and German.