AI Research Engineer

EngineersOfAI; Cambridge; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Graphcore is seeking a Research Engineer to advance AI research with hardware-aware algorithms and scalable implementations. You will work with researchers and engineers on a range of topics from efficient training and inference to world models and reinforcement learning.

The role emphasizes strong software engineering, lower-level programming for hardware efficiency, and collaboration across teams to deliver impactful AI hardware developments.

Qualifications

• Master's/PhD in a technical discipline.
• Strong Python skills with PyTorch or JAX.
• Experience in ML experiments and hardware-aware development.

Responsibilities

• Generate AI/ML ideas and design experiments; implement and evaluate results.
• Prepare and present work to AI conferences and workshops.
• Provide technical insight by designing experiments and reporting results clearly.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to define and test AI hardware advances.

Skills

Python

Deep learning

ML experiments

Lower-level programming

Education

Master's degree or PhD in technical field

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

About Graphcore

At Graphcore, we’re building the future of AI compute. We’re a team of semiconductor, software and AI experts, with deep experience in creating the complete AI compute stack - from silicon and software to infrastructure at datacenter scale. As part of the SoftBank Group, backed by significant long-term investment, we are delivering key technology into the fast-growing SoftBank AI ecosystem. To meet the vast and exciting AI opportunity, Graphcore is expanding its teams around the world. We are bringing together the brightest minds to solve the toughest problems, in a place where everyone has the opportunity to make an impact on the company, our products and the future of artificial intelligence.

Job Summary

As a research engineer at Graphcore, you will contribute to the advancement of AI research, investigating new ideas that push the limits on important AI/ML problems. Specialized hardware has been the key driver of the progress of AI over the last decade, and we believe that hardware-aware AI algorithms and AI-aware hardware developments will continue to be critical to advancing this exciting field. We are therefore looking for individuals who combine strong machine learning experience with practical engineering skills to deliver impactful AI research. We are seeking AI researchers with strong software engineering experience, particularly in lower-level programming and performance optimisation for hardware efficiency. Our research spans a broad range of topics, including efficient training and inference, world models, life sciences, reinforcement learning, and beyond. You will work closely with researchers to generate ideas and translate them into scalable implementations, contributing to publications and projects that help to steer the future of AI hardware.

The Team

Graphcore Research participates in both fundamental and applied research, to characterise the computational requirements of machine intelligence and to demonstrate how hardware can drive the next generation of innovative AI models. We publish at leading AI/ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) as well as specialist workshops, and collaborate with other research teams and organisations across the world.

We pride ourselves on being a supportive and collaborative team, where we organise around our individual research interests to solve problems together in domains such as efficient compute, model scaling and distributed training and inference of AI models for multiple modalities and applications, including for sequence- and graph-based data. We’re based across London, Cambridge and Bristol, with projects and discussions that involve all our locations.

Perhaps the best way to get an idea of what we’re all about is to read one of our papers or an article on our blog. If you’re excited to work at the cutting edge of AI supported by new hardware and want to develop your skills in this area, we’d love to hear from you!

Responsibilities and Duties

• Generate AI/ML ideas, design experiments, implement them and evaluate results.
• Prepare, submit and present your work to AI conferences and workshops.
• Provide technical insight to internal teams by designing experiments and delivering clear, actionable reports.
• Collaborate with researchers, silicon and software engineers at Graphcore to help define, build and test Graphcore’s next generation of AI hardware.

About you

Essential:

• Master’s, PhD or equivalent experience in a technical discipline (e.g., Maths, Statistics, Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry).
• Python programming in a modern deep learning framework, e.g. PyTorch or JAX.
• Familiar with deep learning fundamentals: models, optimisation, evaluation and scaling.
• Capable of designing, executing and reporting from ML experiments.
• Lower-level programming for hardware efficiency, e.g. C++/CUDA/Triton.
• Practical familiarity with hardware capabilities for deep learning – threads, caches, vector & matrix engines, data dependencies, bus widths and throttling.
• Practical familiarity with software stacks for deep learning – compilation, kernel fusion, XLA