Machine Learning Engineer New United Kingdom, London

PlayStation isn't just the Best Place to Play — it's also the Best Place to Work. Today, we're recognised as a global leader in entertainment producing The PlayStation family of products and services including PlayStation5, PlayStation4, PlayStationVR, PlayStationPlus, acclaimed PlayStation software titles from PlayStation Studios, and more. PlayStation also strives to create an inclusive environment that empowers employees and embraces diversity. We welcome and encourage everyone who has a passion and curiosity for innovation, technology, and play to explore our open positions and join our growing global team.

The Gaming, Developer & Future Technology (GDFT) group are PlayStation's technology experts. We research and develop innovative technologies that push the boundaries of play, helping game developers make the best games on PlayStation. As we continue to push the boundaries of technology, we are seeking a talented Machine Learning Engineer at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, & video game development to join our dynamic R&D team.

Our team is dedicated to advancing imitation learning to build intelligent agents capable of playing complex games. In this role, you will leverage foundation models and emerging techniques to drive research forward, deliver innovative solutions for customers, and contribute to publications that shape the future of gaming. As a Machine Learning Engineer, you will be a key contributor to our research team, supporting the technical lead in driving technical excellence and innovation. You will be responsible for designing, implementing, and optimising novel machine learning models and algorithms to perform challenging and diverse tasks. You will perform a central role in a highly collaborative and fast‐moving environment where innovation and creativity are encouraged.

What you'll be doing:

• Imitation Learning Development: Design, develop and deliver novel machine learning techniques to solve diverse tasks in game development, incorporating foundation models and high‐level reasoning into the imitation process.
• Research and Innovation: Contribute to the authorship of team research papers, presenting at relevant conferences.
• Data Analysis: Perform data analysis and cleaning to uncover insights and patterns.
• Collaboration and Creativity: Work with cross‐functional teams to deploy machine learning models in production environments, solving issues and ensuring scalability and performance.
• Communication: Present findings to stakeholders, communicating complex technical issues to both technical and non‐technical colleagues.
• Continuous Learning: Stay current with the latest machine learning and artificial intelligence research, attending top‐tier conferences and communicating information across the team.
• Prototyping: Quickly prototype new ideas and technologies to evaluate relevance and performance.
• Inclusive Culture: Contribute to maintaining a culture of innovation, curiosity, creativity, and continuous learning within the team.

What we are looking for:

• Education: Master's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, robotics, statistics, mathematics, or a related field. A PhD is preferred, but can be substituted with relevant work experience.
• Domain Expertise: 2+ years in machine learning (in industry or academia) with published research papers and proven expertise in Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning or Representation Learning.
• Foundation Models: Hands‐on experience with foundation models at the intersection of language, vision, and action, such as multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), Vision‐Language Models (VLMs), and Vision‐Language‐Action Models (VLAs).
• Parameter‐Efficient Fine‐Tuning: Experience with PEFT methods, including LoRA, for adapting large models efficiently.
• Transformer Architectures: Familiarity with transformer architectures, generative models and knowledge distillation techniques for real‐time deployment in resource‐constrained environments.
• Programming: Proficiency in programming languages and frameworks relevant to machine learning, including Python, NumPy and PyTorch.
• Data Skills: Strong understanding of data analysis, mining and preprocessing.
• Computer Vision: Experience with computer vision in areas such as Self‐Supervised Learning (SSL), multimodal architectures, and post‐training techniques is a plus.
• Research Ambition: A passion for pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence and a commitment to publishing in top‐tier conferences and journals such as IEEE CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or similar.
• Interpersonal Skills: Excellent problem‐solving, communication and interpersonal skills.
• Passion for Gaming: An interest in gaming and exploring the intersection of machine learning and game technology is desirable.

Equal Opportunity Statement: Sony is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All persons will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender (including gender identity, gender expression and gender reassignment), race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or belief, marital or civil partnership status, disability, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity or parental status, trade union membership or membership in any other legally protected category. We strive to create an inclusive environment, empower employees and embrace diversity. We encourage everyone to respond. PlayStation is a Fair Chance employer and qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for employment.