Member of Technical Staff

develop; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity

Visa sponsorship

Relocation support

London office — in person

Job summary

develop is partnering with a well-funded, London-based AI infrastructure company to hire Applied AI Research Engineers. You will study how agentic workflows and retrieval pipelines behave in production, then invent optimisations and ship results into the product.

This is a research-led, engineering-heavy role requiring hands-on implementation, rigorous experimental design, and the ability to translate research into scalable platform capabilities in collaboration with the platform team.

Qualifications

• Broad knowledge across the modern AI stack: agent and workflow design, LLM internals, inference and serving.
• Proven research that shipped, or production AI systems at scale.
• Rigorous experimental design and benchmarking; distinguish real gains from noise.

Responsibilities

• Reverse-engineer agentic systems to identify compute waste and cost-effective paths.
• Build robust routers that route requests along cheapest/fastest paths without quality loss.
• Design layered proxy evaluations to prove no quality regression.
• Extend automatic optimisation to new techniques and decide what to pursue next.
• Create evaluation harnesses, benchmarks and experiment tooling.
• Turn research into general product capability with the platform team.

Skills

Broad AI stack knowledge

Research-to-production

Experimental design

Strong engineering

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

Applied AI Research Engineering, Member of Technical Staff | London | Competitive salary + equity

develop is partnering with a well-funded, London-based AI infrastructure company that has just closed a major funding round led by a top-tier European VC. They are building the software layer that orchestrates models, workflows and specialised silicon into a single system, delivering inference that is dramatically cheaper and faster without any loss in quality.

They are hiring research engineers into their Applied AI Research function. This is a research-led, engineering-heavy role: you will study how real agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines and code intelligence stacks behave in production, then invent ways to optimise them and ship the results into the product.

What you will work on

• Reverse-engineering agentic systems from minimal data and finding where they waste compute
• Building robust routers that send each request down the cheapest or fastest path without regressing on quality
• Designing layered proxy evaluations that prove there is no quality regression
• Extending automatic optimisation to new techniques and helping decide which to pursue next
• Building shared evaluation harnesses, benchmarks and experiment tooling
• Turning research into general product capability alongside the platform team

What you bring

• Broad knowledge across the modern AI stack: agent and workflow design, LLM internals, inference and serving
• Exceptional technical depth, shown through research that shipped, production AI systems at scale, or an early/founding role where you owned a system end to end
• Rigour in experimental design, evaluation and benchmarking; you can separate real gains from noise
• Strong engineering skills: you build what you research
• A fast learner with a bias for action and comfort with ambiguity

Nice to have

• Early or founding experience at an AI-first or deep-tech company
• Multi-agent system design plus depth lower in the stack (kernels, serving engines, latency-critical systems)
• Research in inference optimisation, routing, distillation, evaluation or model internals
• Publications, open-source work or public write-ups
• Familiarity with novel accelerator platforms

What is on offer

• Competitive salary based on skills and experience
• Meaningful equity
• Visa sponsorship and relocation support
• A flat structure where scope grows with what you demonstrate, including the chance to lead the function as it scales
• A fully in-person London office

The client hires across seniority levels, so both experienced researchers and strong earlier-career talent are encouraged to apply.