AI Research Engineer

About the Role

This early-stage, well-funded startup is building advanced AI systems that model and simulate complex real-world behaviour at scale. Their platform enables organisations to test decisions, scenarios and strategies using large-scale AI-driven simulations, dramatically reducing time-to-insight compared to traditional approaches. Following strong early traction and funding injection, they're looking for 2x AI Engineers with deep research expertise to join a small, highly technical team working at the intersection of large language models, agent systems and scalable backend infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Formulating research questions about human / agent behaviour
• Designing experiments on synthetic populations
• Validating model behaviour against real-world data
• Deciding what architectures and methods should exist, not just implementing them

Requirements

Must have requirements:

• PhD / MSc or substantial research experience in AI, ML, CS, Cognitive Science, Physics, Mathematics, or a related field
• Demonstrated ability to conduct independent, hypothesis-driven research
• Strong grounding in experimental design, statistical validation, quantitative evaluation
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python and backend frameworks like FastAPI, Flask, Django
• Hands-on experience working with ML / AI models (LLMs, NLP, simulation, or related areas)
• Comfortable working in ambiguity, where the right question is often unclear at the start

Bonus points for:

• Familiarity with fine-tuning workflows, model optimisation and experiment tracking
• Experience with multi-agent systems, simulations or agent-based modelling
• Experience building workflows/agents on top of existing models
• Experience with relational databases and vector search / embedding systems
• Knowledge of cloud infrastructure, containerisation and deploying ML systems to production
• Experience working in fast-moving environments with evolving requirements