R&D Architect, YOLO Vision AI — Remote

Ultralytics; Madrid; Remote; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Ultralytics seeks an R&D Engineer focused on neural network architectures for YOLO. Design and develop core model architectures powering YOLO across detection, segmentation, pose, and emerging tasks. Work at the intersection of research and production turning papers into production-ready models.

You will collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams, push state-of-the-art, and own R&D tasks from conception to deployment, with strong PyTorch skills and a hands-on, fast-moving mindset.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in computer vision and deep learning with architecture design expertise.
• Proven success building models from the ground up, not just fine-tuning pretrained checkpoints.
• Expert-level Python and deep proficiency in PyTorch, including custom layers, modules, and training loops.
• Strong command of convolutions, attention, normalization, optimization, and loss design fundamentals.
• Ability to read a research paper and implement it faithfully and efficiently from scratch.
• Experience with efficiency research such as quantization, pruning, distillation, or neural architecture search.
• Strong portfolio of research contributions through papers, preprints, open-source code, or original model work.
• High ownership, adaptability, and comfort operating in a fast-moving research environment.

Responsibilities

• Research, design, and build novel neural network architectures for next-generation YOLO models.
• Develop core components including backbones, necks, heads, attention modules, and efficient building blocks.
• Read, reproduce, and extend cutting-edge papers into working model architectures from scratch.
• Run rigorous ablation studies and large-scale architecture experiments across standard benchmarks.
• Improve accuracy, latency, and scaling through distillation, pruning, and quantization-aware design.
• Build training recipes and evaluation pipelines for detection, segmentation, pose, and new vision tasks.
• Partner with R&D and engineering teams to turn research ideas into production-ready open-source models.
• Contribute to foundational model initiatives that support future YOLO and broader vision systems.
• Take ownership of assigned R&D tasks beyond architecture work and solve problems efficiently and correctly.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Convolutions

Attention

Model architecture design

Research-to-production

Optimization techniques

Open-source contributions

Ownership mindset

Portfolio of research

Tools

CUDA

Job description

Ultralytics seeks an R&D Engineer focused on neural network architectures for YOLO. Design and develop core model architectures powering YOLO across detection, segmentation, pose, and emerging tasks. Work at the intersection of research and production turning papers into production-ready models.

You will collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams, push state-of-the-art, and own R&D tasks from conception to deployment, with strong PyTorch skills and a hands-on, fast-moving mindset.