Staff Research Scientist | Language AI in London

Meet DeepL. DeepL is a global AI product and research company focused on building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems. Over 200,000 business customers and millions of individuals across 228 global markets today trust DeepL's Language AI platform for human‐like translation, improved writing and real‐time voice translation. Founded in 2017 by CEO Jarek Kutylowski, DeepL now has over 1,000 passionate employees and is supported by world‐renowned investors including Benchmark, IVP, and Index Ventures.

Our goal is to become the global leader in trusted, intelligent AI technology, building products that drive better communication, foster connections, and create a meaningful impact. To achieve this, we need talented people like you to join our journey.

What sets us apart is our blend of cutting‐edge AI technology, meaningful work, and a culture where people truly thrive. We are a team of innovators, researchers, and creators driven by a shared purpose to unlock human potential by making work simpler, smarter, and more connected.

Our Language AI teams form the foundation of DeepL's success. We are a dedicated group of researchers who collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and designers. Our mission is to build the world's leading language AI system to deliver perfect translations for the most demanding use cases. This includes data, training, quality assurance, and operational aspects.

We are looking for a Staff Research Scientist to lead scientific innovation for our core text translation products. This is a high‐impact, hands‐on role for a research leader who can define long‐term scientific strategy, prototype rapidly, run large‐scale experiments, and drive breakthroughs all the way into production.

Your responsibilities include:

• Lead hands‐on research and development of our core text translation products.
• Drive innovation on methods relevant to achieving perfect translation quality as well as translation quality estimation and evaluation.
• Design, train, and optimize large‐scale, LLM‐based translation models for multilingual accuracy, context awareness, robustness, and varying latency demands.
• Own the full lifecycle of model delivery: prototyping, ablations, training, evaluation, optimization, and production deployment.
• Work closely with engineering teams to integrate models into real‐time systems, ensuring reliability, uptime, and quality at scale.
• Drive improvements in inference efficiency, model serving, voice UX, and robustness to real‐world acoustic conditions.
• Establish strong practices for evaluation, reproducibility, monitoring, and continuous model improvement in production.
• Mentor researchers and engineers, promote hands‐on collaboration, and raise the bar for model quality and operational excellence.

We are looking for:

• Deep expertise in foundations and application of machine translation.
• A hands‐on builder who enjoys training models, running experiments, debugging pipelines, and integrating ML systems into production.
• Experience shipping ML models to production, maintaining them at scale, and working with engineers on deployment, monitoring, and serving.
• Ability to lead complex research efforts while staying grounded in product impact, user experience, and real‐world performance.
• Strong coding and experimentation skills (Python, PyTorch/JAX, audio processing libraries).
• Ability to communicate clearly, collaborate across teams, and align research work with product and engineering priorities.
• Proven experience mentoring others and elevating technical quality across a fast‐moving, applied research team.

What we offer:

• Diverse and internationally distributed team.
• Open communication, regular feedback.
• Hybrid work, flexible hours.
• Virtual Shares - An ownership mindset in every role.
• Regular in‐person team events.
• Monthly full‐day hacking sessions.
• 30 days of annual leave.
• Competitive benefits.

If this role and our mission resonate with you, but you’re hesitant because you don’t check all the boxes, don’t let that hold you back. At DeepL, it’s all about the value you bring and the growth we can foster together. Go ahead, apply—let’s discover your potential together. We can’t wait to meet you!

We are an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at DeepL for who you are—we appreciate authenticity here. Our product is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all succeed, contribute, and think forward!