Research Engineer (Agents) in London

About Native

Native is a VC backed AI startup building the world’s most accurate AI for databases reasoning. This is hard. 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, 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 LLM agents research engineer role, with the opportunity to define how large language models act as reliable, long-horizon agents over complex enterprise data.

• Design and build LLM-powered agent architectures for reasoning over complex tabular, relational, and heterogeneous data
• Develop planning, memory, tool-use, and verification mechanisms that allow LLM agents to operate accurately over databases
• Research and implement techniques for grounding LLM agents in structured data representations (tables, graphs, schemas)
• Build training, simulation, and evaluation environments for long-horizon, multi-step agent behavior
• Develop self-supervised and reinforcement learning objectives for improving agent reliability and correctness
• Integrate foundation model embeddings and symbolic components into agent workflows
• Own agent systems end-to-end, from research prototypes to production-grade systems

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 LLM-based systems with modern ML tooling (PyTorch, Ray, JAX)
• Experience designing agentic systems (planning, memory, tool use, multi-step reasoning)
• Strong understanding of transformers and foundation model behavior
• Comfortable owning whatever needs doing, from research ideas to infrastructure
• Experience optimizing large-scale training, fine-tuning, or simulation workloads 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.