Senior Researcher, Natural Language Processing

Lightspeed Studios; Greater London; On-site; GBP 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

Lightspeed Studios in Greater London is looking for a candidate focused on NLP research and development. The successful applicant will take responsibility for optimizing NLP algorithms and exploring new applications in gaming using deep learning techniques.

Candidates should have a strong understanding of statistical models, familiarity with large language models, and experience with model deployment tools like Hugging Face Transformers and LangChain.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of statistical models and machine learning principles.
• Experience working on NLP related projects.
• Practical experience with large language models like DeepSeel, Qwen, LLaMA.

Responsibilities

• Responsible for NLP research and development.
• Optimize existing online algorithms for reliable NLP solutions.
• Explore applications of NLP techniques and deep learning in games.

Skills

NLP fundamentals

Statistical models

Programming languages

Large language models

Data structures and algorithms

MLOps practices

Tools

DeepSpeed

FSDP

LoRA

Hugging Face Transformers

LangChain

OpenLLM

Job description

Responsibilities

• Responsible for NLP research and development including LLM reasoning, conversational agents, machine translation, part-of-speech tagging, sentence analysis and named entity recognition.
• Optimize existing online algorithms, develop efficient and reliable NLP solutions by combining business needs and data.
• Explore applications of NLP techniques and deep learning algorithms in games.
• Follow the latest developments in academia and industry and quickly apply findings in your work.

Qualifications

• Familiar with NLP fundamentals, with a strong understanding of statistical models, related machine learning principles, and experience working on NLP related projects.
• Proficient in at least one programming language, familiar with basic data structures and algorithms.
• Practical experience working with large language models (e.g., DeepSeel, Qwen, LLaMA), including model fine-tuning, instruction tuning, and evaluation. Familiarity with training optimization frameworks like DeepSpeed, FSDP, and LoRA is highly preferred.
• Experience using tools and frameworks such as LLaMAFactory, Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, or OpenLLM for model deployment, serving, or pipeline development. Comfortable with using modern MLOps practices for NLP workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to publish research results in top-tier NLP conferences (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR) or practical contributions to open-source LLM/NLP projects is preferred.
• Comfortable with both classical (e.g., CRF, SVM) and deep learning approaches (e.g., Transformers, RNNs, CNNs, LSTMs, GANs). Deep understanding of transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, and distributed training techniques is a strong advantage.

Equal Employment Opportunity

As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly believe that diverse voices fuel our innovation and allow us to better serve our users and the community. We foster an environment where every employee of Tencent feels supported and inspired to achieve individual and common goals.