Foundation Models Research Engineer for Autonomous Lab AI

Ellison Institute of Technology; Oxford; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 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 of Technology in Oxford seeks a researcher to advance foundation models for autonomous laboratories, improving performance of autonomous scientific experimentation through data and model interactions. You will design and run systematic experiments, with close collaboration across AI, robotics, software, and domain experts.

Join a multidisciplinary team to translate advances into measurable improvements for real-world laboratory capabilities and publish high-quality research

Qualifications

• MSc, PhD, or equivalent in CS/AI/Robotics or related field.
• Hands-on experience with frontier foundation models including LLMs, VLMs and VLA models, plus embodied AI.
• Experience with pre-training, post-training, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning and other optimisation techniques.
• Hands-on experience building end-to-end ML pipelines: data curation, data mixing, model training and evaluation.
• Experience working in interdisciplinary teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills across disciplines.
• Impact-driven mindset focused on real-world deployment.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical work to improve frontier foundation models for autonomous lab experiments.
• Research data-model interactions to identify bottlenecks and data-centric improvement approaches.
• Define and source data with domain experts to create high-value datasets.
• Design and maintain scalable experimentation pipelines for training, evaluation and reproducibility.
• Analyze results and translate insights into actionable model improvements.
• Collaborate with AI researchers, software engineers, robotics engineers, and domain experts.
• Contribute novel research ideas and publish high-quality work while focusing on deployment.
• Communicate findings clearly across teams to shape the AutoLab AI platform.

Skills

Foundation models

LLMs

VLMs

VLA models

Embodied AI

World models

Data-centric AI

Reinforcement learning

ML pipelines

Data curation

Interdisciplinary teamwork

Communication skills

Education

MSc, PhD, or equivalent in CS/AI/Robotics

Job description

Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford seeks a researcher to advance foundation models for autonomous laboratories, improving performance of autonomous scientific experimentation through data and model interactions. You will design and run systematic experiments, with close collaboration across AI, robotics, software, and domain experts.

Join a multidisciplinary team to translate advances into measurable improvements for real-world laboratory capabilities and publish high-quality research