Research Associate / Doctoral Candidate in the Field of Building and Scaling Agentic AI in Organisations (m/f/d)

About the job

The Institute of Information Management (IWI-HSG) has been conducting application- and design-oriented research at the interface of business and IT for over 30 years. Within the institute, the research group led by Prof. Dr Jan Marco Leimeister investigates how digital technologies transform services, work, and organisations, with a focus on the management of Agentic AI and GenAI in organisations

• You develop agentic AI solutions for organisational use cases together with our industry partners
• You scale these solutions to multi-agent systems, cross-departmental workflows, and cross-platform architectures, including integration into existing enterprise systems. You also investigate questions related to decentralised structures and control mechanisms
• You implement governance aspects practically, e.g. through roles, permissions, and supervisory mechanisms
• You evaluate your prototypes in real organisations. The insights gained are transferred – in close collaboration with your supervisors – into generalisable design knowledge and scientific publications.
• You publish your research results at leading conferences and in top journals
• You contribute to innovative teaching formats and present your technologies to decision-makers from renowned companies, SMEs, and international research institutions working on the introduction and governance of agentic AI

• A working environment that focuses on your strengths: you concentrate on building and evaluating systems, while conception and theory development are carried out in close collaboration with your supervisors.
• A clearly scheduled doctoral programme (approx. 3.5 years) with intensive, practice-oriented supervision throughout all phases
• An entrepreneurial environment and access to real organisational contexts, data, and deployment environments through our industry partners
• High degrees of freedom to help shape the newly founded Center for Digital Enterprise Transformation (CDET) around topics such as AI and cloud transformation
• Participation in leading international conferences and an excellent international research network
• High degrees of freedom in how you build, combined with modern tooling and infrastructure
• Attractive working conditions, including flexibility and a competitive salary
• Support for your career development beyond the doctorate, in academia or industry

• Above-average Master’s degree with a grade point average of at least 5.0 (equivalent to 2.0 in Germany and Austria) in Computer Science, Information Systems, (Business) Engineering, Information Systems, or Business Administration with demonstrable technical depth
• Strong software engineering skills: you are proficient in Python, write production-ready code, and are confident in using Git, APIs, containerisation (e.g. Docker), and cloud environments
• Experience in building LLM-based and agentic systems, for example with frameworks such as LangChain/Lang Graph, OpenAI Agents SDK, or Claude Agent SDK, as well as interoperability protocols like MCP or A2A
• Understanding of organisational contexts: you know business processes, organisational structures, and the economics of IT investments. You can discuss responsibility and value contribution at eye level with department heads – and system architectures with IT
• Interest in governance and orchestration of agentic AI: who is responsible when agents act? How are permissions and supervision designed across departments and platforms? What is needed to move from pilot to scaled deployment?
• Curiosity for research with the aim of further developing systems as a basis for scientific contributions (prior experience in academic writing is an advantage)
• Excellent written and spoken English and German skills

"A place that creates knowledge" – As one of Europe’s leading business universities, the University of St. Gallen (HSG) is committed to educating over 10,000 students and offers an attractive and innovative environment for around 3,500 employees in research, teaching, continuing education, and administration as one of the region’s largest employers."