Research Engineer (Foundation Model) in City of London

About Native

Native is a VC backed AI startup building the world’s most accurate AI for database reasoning. This is an unsolved problem that once solved will change how every enterprise operates. We recently published our results, achieving rank 1 on the industry standard benchmark. Our research team is based in London. Everyone has high agency, is obsessed with the problem we are solving, embraces the intensity of a 6-day week and has the ambition to build something world changing. We are exceptional research engineers and scientists taking a novel approach to accurate database reasoning.

About the role

• This is a founding research engineer role, with the opportunity to set the research agenda and shape the architecture from day one.
• Drive foundational research and engineering for reasoning over complex tabular data.
• Design, implement, and iterate on new encoders (including graph transformers) for complex heterogeneous data.
• Develop creative and impactful self-supervised learning objectives and translate them into production-ready systems.
• Scale novel foundation models across huge datasets.
• Build, optimize, and maintain scalable training and evaluation pipelines.
• Fine-tune foundation model embeddings into high-value downstream tasks.
• Work hands-on across the full stack, from research ideas to deployed systems.
• Guide and mentor an exceptional team of research engineers.

Required experience

• Proven ability to lead or significantly contribute to teams tackling hard research-engineering problems.
• MSc / PhD in Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Strong hands-on experience building, training, and scaling foundation models with modern ML tooling (PyTorch, Ray, JAX).
• Strong background in graph neural networks and transformer architectures.
• Demonstrated ability to turn research ideas into robust, scalable implementations.
• Comfortable owning whatever needs doing, from research prototypes to infrastructure.
• Experience optimizing large-scale training runs on GPU clusters.

Why join us

• This is a rare chance to join a founding team operating at the frontier of AI, with the resources to win.
• Impact: You will push the frontier of foundation models for an under-explored, massively valuable domain.
• Team: We are a small, collaborative, world-class research team based in central London.
• Founding level equity + competitive salary: We want you to share in the upside of what we are building. As part of the founding team, you will receive meaningful ownership alongside a salary that allows you to focus on building something great.
• Direction: Chance to shape the direction of a new class of foundation model from day one.

Culture

At Native, we look for people with exceptional research and engineering ability, who want to win. Everyone loves building and is ambitious enough to want to change how the world operates for the better. We run towards hard problems. We are creative problem solvers, who keep going until we find the underlying principle of the problem, and build to solve that. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, are intrinsically motivated and want to have a huge impact, we are a great fit.