AI Research Engineer / Senior AI Research Engineer

University of Sheffield; Sheffield; On-site; GBP 40,000 - 60,000; Full time

Job summary

A UK-based university seeks an AI Research Engineer to support the development of multimodal AI solutions. The role involves collaborating on high-impact projects, maintaining infrastructure, and implementing AI models using PyTorch. The ideal candidate has experience in research software and open science principles, and will engage with diverse stakeholders to promote interdisciplinary collaboration.

Qualifications

• A CV and cover letter are required with your application.
• Experience with open science practices.
• Ability to collaborate with diverse stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with teams to implement multimodal AI solutions.
• Maintain OMAIB infrastructure on GitHub.
• Develop AI models in PyTorch.

Skills

Experience delivering robust research software

Familiarity with PyTorch or related frameworks

Collaboration with Principal Investigators

Job description

Overview

You will join the AI Research Engineering team within the University of Sheffield's Centre for Machine Intelligence, supporting the UKRI-EPSRC funded UK Open Multimodal AI Network's flagship Open Multimodal AI Benchmark (OMAIB) initiative. OMAIB develops open, community-driven datasets, evaluation protocols, baseline models, and deployment-centric tasks to accelerate multimodal AI solutions for Tomorrow's Engineering Research Challenges.

As an AI Research Engineer, you will work on cross-cutting technologies that support a portfolio of short, high-impact projects funded through OMAIB calls. These span domains such as healthcare, materials discovery, and transportation systems. You will collaborate with Principal Investigators, industry partners, and end-user stakeholders to provide the research and software engineering expertise needed to deliver robust, reproducible, and openly accessible outputs.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with other teams to implement multimodal AI solutions using best-practice software engineering and open science principles.
• Maintain OMAIB infrastructure such as repositories, documentation, and leaderboards on GitHub.
• Develop models in PyTorch or related frameworks.
• Support project teams to prepare datasets, code, and evaluation protocols.
• Engage with researchers, industry partners, and policymakers to enable interdisciplinary research and open outputs.

Qualifications and Requirements

• A CV and cover letter are required with your application. In your cover letter, please include: 1) a link to a representative piece of your writing; 2) a link to a code sample (eg GitHub or a downloadable zip), and 3) a short description of a collaboration experience.
• Experience delivering robust research software and open science practices.
• Familiarity with PyTorch or related frameworks and experience working on multimodal AI projects.
• Ability to collaborate with Principal Investigators, industry partners, and end-user stakeholders.

Benefits and Diversity

We are committed to exploring flexible working opportunities which benefit the individual and University. We build teams of people from different heritages and lifestyles from across the world, whose talent and contributions complement each other to greatest effect. We believe diversity in all its forms delivers greater impact through research, teaching and student experience.