Research Engineer

Crane Venture Partners; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity stake

London office presence

25 days leave + holidays

Learning & development budget

Travel for meetings

Daily lunches

Team offsites

Job summary

Encord, a leading AI data platform, seeks a Research Engineer to advance robotics, computer vision, and multimodal research across data curation, annotation, evaluation and quality control. You will work on end-to-end prototypes and contribute to core product.

The role emphasizes fundamentals, independent research, and long-term impact, with strong Python/PyTorch requirements and collaboration across ML and Product teams in a hybrid London setting.

Qualifications

• PhD in computer vision, machine learning or related field or equivalent applied research experience
• Strong background in computer vision and multimodal ML
• Evidence of independent research such as publications or open-source work
• Solid foundations in statistics, probability and linear algebra
• Strong Python and PyTorch skills and experience running experiments end-to-end
• Genuine interest in data-centric AI: curation, evaluation and data quality

Responsibilities

• Form hypotheses, design experiments, and drive original research on open problems from leading robotics and AI customers
• Research and prototype agentic workflows handling multimodal inputs and diverse ontologies
• Advance data curation and model evaluation
• Tackle egocentric video understanding from captioning to 3D understanding
• Build working prototypes end-to-end and integrate them into the platform
• Help shape longer-term research direction and bring ideas back to the team
• Publish papers and present work at conferences and workshops

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Independent research

Data-centric AI

Education

PhD in computer vision or ML

Tools

Git

OpenCV

PyTorch

Job description

About us

Encord is the universal data layer for AI that helps 300+ AI teams train and run models on the right data. Our platform indexes, curates, annotates, and evaluates data across the full AI lifecycle, from development through production. Trusted by Woven by Toyota, AXA, UiPath, Zipline, and more.

We're an ambitious team of 100+ working at the frontier of AI and have raised $60M in Series C funding from Wellington Management, CRV, Next47 and Y Combinator.

The role

We're looking for a Research Engineer to join Encord's ML team. You'll work on robotics, computer vision and multimodal research in data curation, annotation, evaluation and quality control, with successful work going into the core product.
We face a variety of interesting research problems across the full data life-cycle, including annotation, quality control, verification and curation. We are looking to strengthen our team to build upon and extend our market-leading platform. The kind of problems we solve are constantly evolving alongside the needs of our frontier customers, including many of the leading robotics and physical AI teams. Join us as we leverage our massive flow of proprietary data on our journey to develop generalised solutions applicable across diverse multi-modal tasks.

What you'll do

• Form hypotheses, design experiments, and drive original research on open problems from leading robotics and AI customers
• Research and prototype agentic workflows which can handle multimodal inputs and diverse customer ontologies
• Advance our work on data curation and model evaluation
• Tackle egocentric video understanding, from captioning to deeper 3d understanding
• Build working prototypes to test ideas end to end, then partner with our ML systems and Product Engineering teammates to bring them into the platform
• Help shape our longer-term research direction and bring the most relevant ideas from the field back to the team
• Publish research papers and present your work at conferences and workshops

Who we're looking for

• A builder with a research mindset. You can take an open-ended problem, form a hypothesis and get to a working prototype without a detailed spec.
• A first-principles problem solver. You lean on strong fundamentals rather than surface-level familiarity with the latest trends.
• A big-picture thinker. You're excited by ambitious, longer-term problems and know how to break them into steps.
• A multiplier. You raise the level of the team around you by shaping research direction, mentoring others and turning findings into decisions.

Experience requirements

• A PhD in computer vision, machine learning or a related field, or equivalent applied research experience
• A strong background in computer vision and multimodal ML, whether in traditional CV, modern VLMs and embedding models, or both
• Clear evidence of independent research, such as publications, a thesis, open-source work or applied research where you owned the original contribution
• Solid mathematical foundations in statistics, probability and linear algebra
• Strong Python and PyTorch skills, and experience running experiments end-to-end
• A genuine interest in data-centric AI: curation, evaluation and data quality
• Bonus: experience applying LLM-based agents to visual tasks, or working with video, 3D or other complex data types

We’ll start reviewing applications from 1 November 2026. It may take a little while to hear back, but every application will get proper consideration.

Why Encord

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity in a high-growth startup
• Strong in-person culture — most of the team works from our London office 4+ days/week
• 25 days annual leave + UK public holidays
• Annual learning & development budget
• Travel for customer visits, events, and conferences across the UK and Europe
• Daily company lunches
• Monthly socials & bi-annual team offsites