Foundation Models Research Engineer – Data-Driven AI Lab

Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford; Oxford; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Enhanced holiday pay

Pension

Life Assurance

Income Protection

Private Medical Insurance

Hospital Cash Plan

Therapy Services

Perk Box

Electric Car Scheme

Job summary

Ellison Institute is seeking a senior researcher to advance foundation models for autonomous laboratory workflows in Oxford. You will examine how data, model architecture, and training stages influence end-to-end scientific performance and guide practical improvements.

You will work with AI researchers, software and robotics engineers, and domain scientists to translate research into measurable lab capabilities and publish in top venues where appropriate.

Qualifications

• MSc, PhD, or equivalent industry experience in CS/AI/Robotics.
• Hands-on with frontier foundation models including LLMs, VLMs, VLA, and embodied AI.
• Experience with pre-training, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and model optimization.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical work to improve performance of frontier foundation models for autonomous labs.
• Investigate data-model interactions and develop data-centric improvement approaches.
• Define data needs and curate high-value experimental datasets with domain experts.
• Build scalable pipelines for training, evaluation, benchmarking, and reproducible research.
• Analyze results scientifically and translate insights into practical model gains.
• Collaborate with AI researchers, software/robotics engineers, and scientists to deploy findings.
• Contribute novel ideas and publish research while focusing on real-world deployment.
• Communicate findings across teams to shape the AutoLab AI platform.

Skills

PhD or MSc in Computer Science/AI

Frontier models experience

Embodied AI/Robotics

End-to-end ML pipelines

Interdisciplinary collaboration

Education

MSc/PhD in CS/AI/Robotics

Tools

LLMs

Vision-Language Models

Job description

Ellison Institute is seeking a senior researcher to advance foundation models for autonomous laboratory workflows in Oxford. You will examine how data, model architecture, and training stages influence end-to-end scientific performance and guide practical improvements.

You will work with AI researchers, software and robotics engineers, and domain scientists to translate research into measurable lab capabilities and publish in top venues where appropriate.