Senior Applied AI Engineer in London

About Gendo

Gendo is a revolutionary, browser-based AI platform designed to empower architects and designers to generate accurate, high-quality visual representations of their designs in seconds, not days - a huge improvement on existing workflows. Within 18 months of founding we built an alpha product, beta product and, in summer of this year, launched our early-access product publicly. Today this product has thousands of users across many organisations, generating tens of thousands of images. We pride ourselves on being a lean, focused and efficient team formed of highly talented individuals. This, and our product driven mantra, led to us securing both substantial pre-seed-stage and seed-stage funding from renowned investors within the space, enabling us to expand our team and deliver on our ambitious vision.

What we value

At Gendo, design is at the core of our mission - both in the design of our products and also through its power to elevate creative expression, pushing the boundaries of architectural possibilities. Driven by the power of collaboration, we have refined our technology in partnership with renowned firms such as Zaha Hadid Architects, Benoy, KPF, and David Chipperfield Architects, and of course within the Gendo team itself. We take an exploratory approach to work, continuously innovating and seeking new ways to enhance the design process for our users. Our ambition is big, we're building a passionate, dedicated, world-class team to transform the future of architecture and design, making cutting-edge tools accessible and enabling users to bring their boldest ideas to life with speed and precision.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Applied AI Specialist to bridge the gap between generative AI research and design practice. This role is all about exploring, testing, and adapting image-generation models to meet the specific needs of architects and designers. Your work will focus on evaluating new models against Gendo's core features (Render, Material, Style, Describe), benchmarking for consistency and aesthetic quality, and experimenting with solutions to design problems not yet solved by existing AI. You'll prototype quickly - writing custom ComfyUI nodes, spinning up lightweight UIs in our frontend stack, and training models for design-specific tasks. This is a role for someone who lives at the intersection of design and technology, with hands-on experience in image generation models, strong technical skills, and a sharp visual/design eye.

Key Responsibilities

• Model evaluation & benchmarking: Test new open-source and proprietary models against Gendo's features, assessing aesthetic quality, fidelity, and usability from an architectural design perspective.
• Custom pipeline prototyping: Create and adapt ComfyUI custom nodes and workflows to experiment with new functionality and solve unsolved user problems.
• Dataset curation & training: Collect, label, and refine datasets; train LoRAs, checkpoints, and fine-tuned diffusion models for architecture-specific tasks (materials, lighting, style).
• Rapid UI prototyping: Build small internal tools to test data flows and user interactions with new models. Experience with JavaScript would be a bonus for this.
• Scaling experiments: Use GPU on demand platforms and cloud infrastructure to orchestrate and scale tests, training, and evaluations.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Work closely with Product and Engineering teams to hand off validated pipelines and guide feature development.
• Stay current with emerging technology: Track, evaluate, and report on new model releases, training methods, and tools in the open-source ecosystem. Share insights with the team on opportunities and risks, and propose experiments to test new approaches.

Requirements

• Hands-on generative AI experience: Direct work with image-generation models (Stable Diffusion, SDXL, ControlNet, VAE, embeddings). Practical experience training LoRAs, fine-tuned checkpoints, or other open-source models.
• Technical skills: Python + PyTorch for model manipulation and training. ComfyUI & Other Open Source Projects: comfortable building and extending workflows with custom nodes. Ability to rapidly prototype ideas with MVP UIs. Familiarity with APIs and integration patterns.
• Architecture/Design awareness: Background in architecture, CGI, rendering, or VFX. Strong visual judgement around composition, materiality, lighting, and realism.
• Infrastructure exposure: Experience running GPU workloads on AWS or similar cloud environments. Understanding of workflow orchestration tools.

It would be a bonus for you to have:

• Contributions to open-source diffusion frameworks (e.g. ComfyUI nodes).
• Prior work in architectural visualization, design tech, or VFX pipelines.
• Familiarity with CAD/BIM or 3D rendering software.

How This Role Differs from a Traditional ML Engineer

This is not a research-heavy ML role optimising for academic benchmarks (FID, IS, etc.). Instead, success is measured by:

• Design quality & usability: how consistent, controllable, and aesthetically strong the outputs are.
• Exploratory problem solving: testing and prototyping workflows that solve real, unsolved design problems.
• Creative judgement: applying an architectural or visual design lens to AI evaluation.
• Applied prototyping: building fast, practical pipelines and UIs rather than focusing solely on production ML systems.

If you thrive on hands-on generative AI work and love the idea of shaping tools for designers and architects, this is the role for you.

Why join Gendo?

• Be a key player in driving the growth of a groundbreaking AI platform that is reshaping the architecture and design industry.
• Collaborate with leading architects and designers from top firms like Zaha Hadid Architects.
• Work in a dynamic, fast-paced environment where your ideas and initiatives are valued.
• Be part of a creative, innovative team dedicated to pushing the limits of what's possible in frontend development.

What we offer

This is a full-time position, during which you'll spend 3 days a week in either our London or Bristol office, and 2 days a week working remotely from home (in the UK). Stock options; we firmly believe that you should share our future successes with ownership in the company. 25 days holiday, plus a day off during your birthday week. Private medical, dental and vision insurance. Flexible well-being allowance (e.g. gym membership). Frequent company socials and events.