Founding AI Research Engineer

Job Title: Founding AI Research Engineer

Location: London

Salary: Up to £120,000 DOE

A well-funded AI startup building deeply personalised models that understand the full context of how you work is hiring a Founding AI Research Engineer to help shape its scientific and research direction from the ground up.

This is a rare opportunity to join at founding level and work end to end across some of the hardest problems in applied AI today, including retrieval and knowledge base systems, reasoning models, and models that understand information live on screen and across applications. You will take projects from inception through to product, with genuine ownership over both the research and the engineering.

This role suits someone who enjoys solving deep technical and research level problems, building products end to end rather than handing off at the research stage, and staying close to the cutting edge of NLP, vision, and related fields.

What we are looking for

• BSc or MSc from a Russell Group university, minimum 2:1
• 5+ years of experience solving comparable problems in either academic or industrial settings
• A strong track record across both scientific workflows, such as forming and testing hypotheses, and engineering workflows, such as building robust, scalable products
• The ability to read and critically engage with current AI and NLP research, and to implement and build upon it
• Hands on experience with NLP, LLMs, or other applied AI and ML
• Strong programming skills, particularly Python

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• Experience with cloud infrastructure and database technologies, including SQL and NoSQL
• Ability to self organise and operate independently in a fast moving environment
• Based in or willing to relocate to London. Visa sponsorship available for the right candidate

Particularly strong candidates will also have

• A deep background in ML, computer science, statistics, physics, or mathematics, ideally including a research degree or industrial research experience

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• Experience with C++ or Rust
• A track record of open source contribution or notable independent technical projects

Why this role

This is a founding level position with significant equity upside and the chance to shape both the technical direction and culture of the company from an early stage. The work sits at the genuine frontier of personalised AI, and you will be working on problems that few teams anywhere are tackling at this depth.

Visa sponsorship is available for candidates relocating to London.

If your background fits, apply below.