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.
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Member of Technical Staff in London employer: develop
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