To be filled from

01.10.2026

Your working environment

TRATON Research & Development (R&D) is undergoing a major transformation to establish a strong, global Group R&D organization. Our goal is to deliver a time-critical roadmap, deliver outstanding customer value, and drive innovation across our brands - Scania, MAN, INTERNATIONAL and Volkswagen Truck & Bus. This transformation will strengthen our competitiveness and position Group R&D as a key business partner within TRATON Group. We are now looking for you to be part of this exciting change journey, shaping the future of Group R&D.

About us

At TRATON R&D, you are an important part of something bigger. Joining us means gaining access to the ins and outs of the entire transportation industry. As part of a global team of industry experts, you get to think bigger, experience more, and reach further. Being bigger also means being stronger. Together with our brands, we have the collective power to transform the transportation.

We see the individuality of our employees as a strength and welcome diverse applications from people with different backgrounds. If you need support during your application, please contact us.

Conversational AI as a human-machine interface represents a key enabling technology in the field of commercial vehicles. The main objective of this master thesis project is to advance the development of conversational AI for drivers of commercial vehicles from its current driver-user experience foundation towards emotion-aware interaction. It builds upon existing work in the field of driver user experience.

You will be part of TRATON R&D Germany GmbH in collaboration with the Chair of Health Informatics (CHI, Prof. Dr. Schuller), School of Computation, Information and Technology at TUM. In your role, you will work as a member of the core development team at TRATON R&D from the industrial side, while being academically supported by the CHI. As the industry partners are also located in Sweden, occasional business travels may be required.

You can look forward to these tasks
Your work will cover multiple aspects of applied AI research and industry application, such as:

• Identification of the promising state-of-the-art model approaches
• Definition (or refinement) of test cases and driver interaction scenarios
• Benchmarking of available model types under defined boundary conditions (based on requirements from previous investigations)
• Augmenting a pre-existing conversational model with emotion recognition capabilities
• Deployment of the developed model on a prototype level environment (e.g., truck simulator or real vehicle)
• Training, testing, and evaluation based on defined use cases and scenarios against the evaluation criteria

We are looking forward to

• Student at the TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology, eligible to start a master thesis
• Practical experience in deep learning, knowledgeable in standard Python frameworks, such as PyTorch and TensorFlow
• Familiarity with large language models is beneficial
• Experience in affective computing/emotion recognition is a plus
• Independent, structured, and analytical working style
• Strong English skills (academic level); good German and Swedish skills are a plus but not mandatory
• Willingness to work with and adapt to various systems and environments

Has TRATON piqued your interest? We look forward to receiving your detailed application!

Job information 

Reference number: 6147 

Claudia Wünsche, [email protected], will be happy to answer any questions about HR you may have. 

The contact person for the department is: Simon Bucher, [email protected] 

Integrity and compliance are essential parts of our corporate culture. 

We promote diversity and equal opportunities and look forward to receiving diverse applications.